The Twitter Primary for January 2020

As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.

Five months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.

I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.

The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:

  1. Bernie Sanders: 10,387,974 (up 250,595)
  2. Joe Biden: 4,136,560 (up 91,552)
  3. Elizabeth Warren: 3,656,031 (up 82,196)
  4. Michael Bloomberg: 2,400,724 (up 36,373)
  5. Pete Buttigieg: 1,600,953 (up 28,982)
  6. Andrew Yang: 1,207,702 (up 83,546)
  7. Amy Klobuchar: 876,409 (up 37,138)
  8. Tulsi Gabbard: 774,170 (up 10,490)
  9. Tom Steyer: 278,793 (up 25,326)
  10. Deval Patrick: 53,931 (up 1,412)
  11. Michael Bennet: 44,611 (up 1,799)
  12. John Delaney: 38,213 (up 198)

Removed from the last update: Cory Booker, Marianne Williamson, Julian Castro

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 71,730,827 followers, up an astounding 3,691,379 since the last roundup, so not only has Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined, the impeachment farce seems to have tripled the number of followers he usually gains. To put it another way, Trump gained more followers in a month than Warren has total followers. The official presidential @POTUS account has 27,975,624 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

A few notes:

  • Bernie is having a great month. In addition to now topping polls, he gained as many Twitter followers as his next three Democratic rival gainers (Biden, Yang and Warren) combined.
  • Biden’s follower gain rate picked up only slightly, but he moved into second because Cory Booker dropped out.
  • I expected Warren’s follower gains to tail off with the rest of her campaign, but it actually picked up a tick.
  • Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
  • Bloomberg and Steyer’s upticks are also picking up slightly.
  • Given her previous rate of follower addition, for Klobuchar, endorsements from both the New York Times and the Des Moines Register have gained her…maybe 12,000 followers.
  • Patrick, Bennet and Delaney are all dead in the water, and Gabbard is barely moving.
  • Weird statistical anomaly: Last month Bennet was up 799 followers. This month, he’s up 1,799 followers.

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 6:51 AM and is filed under Democrats, Elections, Media Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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