Election 2020: Surging social media for Trump contrasts polls results
President Trump surges on Twitter as he dips in the polls.
What’s happening? Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s recent surge in national polls has been matched by an increase in activity and interactions amongst President Trump’s supporters, our analysis of Twitter data reveals.
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION POLLS
2020 presidential general election polls. The Y-axis shows the percentage of the population with the intention to vote for a particular candidate. Source: FiveThirtyEight
TWITTER ACTIVITY
Twitter activity associated with Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s camps over time. The Y-axis shows the number of active Twitter accounts with at least 25,000 followers and at least three interactions with users in the same camp for Trump (red) and Biden (blue). Source: Kineviz
By the numbers: graph analysis’s ability to identify interactions and patterns in large amounts of data over time reveals increased Trump supporters’s Twitter accounts and more interactions and stronger coordination amongst them.
The analysis controlled for bots. The two camps were first analyzed with accounts having more than 25,000 followers, minimizing the impact of bots. Dynamics observed did not change when including accounts with a lower number of followers.
Why it matters? More supporters for President Trump are more active. Just as Joe Biden’s supporters became less active over the past month, both the number of Twitter accounts supporting President Trump and their interactions went up, as illustrated in the graph above.
One of the reasons that these observations matter beyond this election is that Twitter activity could offer an alternative source of election forecasting data.
What to watch? While leading pollster FiveThirtyEight advised not to get too obsessed with comparisons to 2016, our analysis shows that rapid changes can happen in the final days leading up to the election.
Flavius Mihaies for Data Journalism DC in collaboration with Kineviz.
Note on methodology: data and data analysis available at kineviz.com/election2020
Many thanks to Anthony Landreth for his comments and suggestions.
