THE ECHO: Weekly Roundup of Political Discussion on Twitter (March 22–28, 2018)
March for Our Lives and the National Rifle Associations’ Response, Stormy Daniels vs. Trump/Cohen, McMaster Fired, Costello Retires, Omnibus Signed Over Veto Threat
This was a week of call-response in American politics that echoed on Twitter. The March for Our Lives drew an estimated 800,000 to Washington and elsewhere to protest for gun law changes while the National Rifle Association responded, at times targeting the student leaders themselves. Stormy Daniels’ appearance on “60 Minutes” drew its largest audience in 10 years, an estimated 22 million viewers while President Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, responded separately. Congress passed an omnibus spending bill, which Trump threatened to veto but reluctantly signed. Trump then fired National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. A new Democrat-friendly redistricting map was upheld in Pennsylvania, prompting Rep. Ryan Costello to respond in pulling out of the GOP primary.
March for Our Lives vs. National Rifle Association
The most significant political event of the week was the March for Our Lives, which was led by the students of Parkland’s Stoneman Douglas High School with strong assistance from adults. According to the official website, donations are to be sent to California, not Florida and signs with #Enough were tagged at the bottom or in the corners with “Women’s March Youth,” an organization directed by adults. With hundreds of thousands protesting and 4,824,084 related tweets among the main hashtags, up 850 percent from the previous week, the worldwide rallies dominated most adjacent news cycles.
This seems to have been the impetus for aggressive responses by the National Rifle Association (NRA), who stepped up their attacks on the proposals and the people leading the protests. Calling it a march for their lies, the host said that if their friends had not died, “no one would know their names,” a particularly harsh statement toward the teenage survivors. Moreover, a fake picture of one of the student leaders, Emma Gonzalez, was shared widely among NRA supporters of her tearing up the Constitution, not a gun target sheet, which was real. NRA fundraising has spiked, and we found a 124 percent increase in Twitter volume this week to 1,672,319 posts.
Stormy Daniels vs. Trump and Cohen
The most watched political event of the week was Stormy Daniels’ interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS’ 60 Minutes. Daniels detailed relationship with Trump and recounted how she was intimidated by the future president’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, who can be found on Twitter @MichaelCohen212 (not me and no relation). Mine is @MichaelCohen and you really ought to take a moment to enjoy the responses to the @ replies for a minute before continuing this article. Twitter volume for Daniels was up 77 percent from the previous week to 1,086,526 related posts while Trump’s lawyer’s Twitter volume was up 159 percent on about ten times fewer related posts or 106,485 tweets. Trump’s Twitter volume was up just one percent as he chose, wisely, not to engage Daniels or defend Cohen directly. Trump, instead, bemoaned “so much Fake News” from his personal Twitter account.
Political Decisions and Departures
President Trump’s decision to sign the omnibus bill passed by Congress to fund the government through September was not an easy one. His veto threat was not wholly directed at the size of the $1.3 trillion package, though he called it “ridiculous.” It was what it lacked: funding for The Wall. The bill did not include the $25 billion for its construction, which the president requested, instead funding only 33 miles of new barriers, which has been referred to as a “down payment.” This sparked Twitter volume increases of 684 percent for the omnibus and 144 percent for The Wall (672,024 and 614,702 related tweets, respectively).
The slow roll firing of H.R. McMaster was initiated by President Trump with leaks to the press, first reported by The Washington Post and denied initially by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee. But like a baseball manager who gets the “full support” from ownership amid rumors of a firing, it was obvious that the drip, drip, drip was true, culminating in McMaster’s dismissal, announced on Twitter. The platform responded with a relatively quiet departure tweet volume of 101,178 related posts, representing a 59 percent increase from last week. Twitter saw this one coming.
An angry Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello (PA-06) chose to retire than to compete in a redrawn district, upheld by the Supreme Court, and Twitter gave him a farewell (much of it was not benevolent) of 16,060 related tweets, about 10,000 more than the next closest incumbent (Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, CA-48-R) in the hot races we are tracking. Costello’s Twitter volume spiked 925 percent from the previous seven days, the strongest increase of any of the institutions, key races, newsmakers, or hot topics we covered this week.
“The ECHO” is a publication of The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM). This edition covers political activity on Twitter in the United States March 21–28, 2018. All data from this post, as well as our methodology, is available on our PEORIA Project website and weekly by email (subscribe here). Also available on our website is the first edition of The ECHO Quarterly, summarizing three big things this research can teach campaigns and elected officials.
