A Portrait of Polarization: Immediate Reactions to Kamala Harris as VP Candidate

By Steve Hedden and Dave Bohl

We started streaming Twitter for all tweets with the word “Kamala” and/or “BidenHarris” right after she was announced as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate today. After collecting tweets for a little over two hours (from about 3:30 MT to about 5:45 MT), we created an analysis of the network. Like in our previous analyses, we used natural language processing (NLP) to determine overall sentiment within the communities.

Read more about our methodology and how to read the network visualization in our previous post.

Not surprisingly, two very distinct communities formed quickly — one with largely positive sentiments about Senator Harris, the other largely negative.

What’s notable here is 1) there are only two major communities, perhaps showcasing our country’s left-right divide, and 2) there are very few tweets in the middle. By contrast, other networks that we’ve analyzed recently based on other polemical keywords like “COVID” or “Black Lives Matter” tend to generate multiple communities, usually with more middle ground.

There was one tweet that seemed to bridge the divide, from @ jimgeraghty, that celebrated Harris’s historic candidacy as continued proof of the American…