The Pulse of the Nation: A Twitter Analysis of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
Aadit Barua and Josh Barua, Westlake High School, Austin, TX.
The low down on 3rd November, 2020
What are the top issues on Twitter users’ minds for the 2020 U.S. presidential election? How do they associate the democratic nominee, former Vice President Biden, and President Trump with these issues? Is there any difference between the battleground states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and the rest of the country in terms of what is important to voters, and how they feel about the candidates? How does this election differ from the one in 2016? What should each candidate focus on between now and 3rd November? These are the questions we addressed in our study using 47,901 tweets from 18,656 unique users in the U.S.A. between July 1 and August 16, 2020 (the day before the start of the Democratic National Convention), and 14,000 tweets from 10,838 unique users in 2016.
The top issues according to our 2020 data are USPS, Russia, rigging/stealing the election, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter (BLM), deaths from COVID-19, democracy, misinformation, racism, and China. While people are associating President Trump quite strongly with many of these issues, the troubling news for him is that the public sentiments are all negative…
