Women of the DNC
Senator Kamala Harris accepted her party’s vice presidential nomination last night, making history by becoming the first Black and South Asian American woman to be on a major party ticket. The third night of the DNC convention also featured speeches by several prominent Democratic women, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Secretary of State and Senator, Hillary Clinton, and Massachusetts Senator, Elizabeth Warren. We analyzed tweets posted during the DNC to examine the social media reactions to each of their speeches. Here we briefly describe our methodology and present the results of our analysis.
We collected tweets posted between 9:00-11:00 p.m. (EST) that used any of the DNC-related hashtags (e.g., #DNC2020, #DemConvention), and then used keyword searches to identify those tweets that referenced Harris, Warren, Clinton or Pelosi. Next, we classified these tweets to topics using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. Finally, we examined the “reach” of each topic, defined by Brandwatch’s estimate of how many different people would’ve seen the content through the original tweet, or through retweets and replies. We further distinguished between the reach achieved among verified Twitter users (i.e., those with the blue badge) and non-verified Twitter users. Twitter verifies accounts that it determines are of public interest, such as those maintained by journalists. We were curious whether there would differences in social media content about these speeches between verified and non-verified Twitter users.
We begin with the topics extracted from non-verified accounts, which we presume reflect tweets posted by non-elites.
Tweets posted during each woman’s respective speech at the DNC convention.
Reactions to Sen. Harris’ acceptance speech are broken into five topics. Reaction to Harris captures tweets focused on Harris’ autobiographic introduction to her family, upbringing and racial identity. One of Harris’ best one-liners from the night: “there is no vaccine for racism” also went viral on social media. Many Twitter users celebrated Harris’ selection for VP and reacted to her other memorable remark, “I know a predator when I see one,” a presumed dig at President Trump. Finally, the remaining tweets were reactions to the speech itself, such as “I’m not crying, you’re crying” and “Seeing the excitement from the #DivineNine and the #HBCU community has me in so many feels.”
Tweets about Sen. Warren’s speech are similarly divided between one-liners that went viral on social media and reactions to her and her speech. Aunt Bee captures the Twitter reaction to Warren’s explanation of how her Aunt moved in to help Warren raise her children while she also held down a job. There were numerous reactions to her call for staying “in this fight so that when our children and our grandchildren ask what we did during this dark chapter in our nation’s history, we will be able to look them squarely in the eye and say: we organized, we persisted, and we changed America.” Warren’s discussion about reforming the child care system also received substantial attention on Twitter. As Warren put it: “We build infrastructure like roads, bridges, and communications systems so that people can work. That infrastructure helps us all because it keeps our economy going. It’s time to recognize that child care is part of the basic infrastructure of this nation — it’s infrastructure for families.” Finally, there were tweets reacting to her criticism of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and more general reactions to the speech as a whole.
Clinton also had several one-liners that went viral on Twitter, including her pleas for Democrats to request their ballots now and to vote early: “This can't be another woulda-coulda-shoulda election.” Twitter users also reacted when Clinton remarked, "“Now more than ever remember, back in 2016, when Trump asked, “What do you have to lose? Well, now we know our healthcare, our jobs, our loved ones, our leadership in the world, and even our post office” and that she also wished “Donald Trump knew how to be a president because America needs a president now.” But of all the women who spoke on the third night, most tweeted about, well, Clinton. Though most were quite positive (“I love Hillary Clinton. Never apologetic!” and “Wow Hillary came swinging”), there were also those that were not, such as “Pathetic that Hillary Clinton keeps pretending that foreign adversaries stole the 2016 election from her. She lost fair and square…” and “Oh gods, Hillary! Back to the woods! Go! Never come back!”
Finally, tweets about Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were a mix of reactions to the montage video that preceded her speech (where we were reminded that she knows how to throw a punch and that, as a mother of five, has seen plenty of temper tantrums). Regarding the speech itself, Twitter users reacted to her sharp attacks on Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and to her one-liner that “We will remember in November, when we elect Joe Biden president.” As with Warren, there were tweets about the policy substance of her speech, including healthcare, Social Security, affordable childcare, and abortion. Finally, tweets about Pelosi fell into two categories, those tied to her performance at the DNC (reactions to Pelosi) and those that focused on her (strong) leadership skills.
We also classified tweets posted by verified Twitter users. There are a few notable differences, particularly regarding tweets about Nancy Pelosi. So what explains the spike in tweets classified as reactions to Pelosi? That would be the tweet from @GOP: “When Speaker Pelosi isn’t blocking relief to Americans, she’s: -Inventing conspiracy theories about the Postal Service -Endangering law enforcement by smearing them as Nazis -Taking the side of the left-wing mob #DemConvention”
Tweets posted during each woman’s respective speech at the DNC convention.