The Democratic Nomination: The Issues Dominating Twitter
The battle for the Democratic nomination is now in full swing. At the beginning of the year, fifteen candidates sought the Democratic nomination. Now with Super Tuesday in the rearview mirror, the race has narrowed considerably, with former Vice President Joe Biden leading the delegate count over Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont.
FiveThirtyEight’s Primary forecast of candidates’ likelihood of securing the Democratic nomination was quite volatile in the weeks following the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. Biden’s poor performance in both states appeared to be the death knell of his candidacy. But his strong victories in South Carolina and Michigan now make his nomination all but assured. Has there been similar turbulence in the issue landscape as candidates rise, fall, and drop out of the race? Are there any particular issues that have broken out as the field of candidates has narrowed?
To answer these questions, we are tracking the issues engaging voters and candidates over the course of the 2020 presidential election cycle. From now until Election Day, we will trace the ebbs and flows of the issues garnering attention on social and news media and in candidates’ speeches, debates, and political advertising. We will examine how Americans are talking about politics, both online and off, and how social media interacts with the issue priorities of the news media, voters, and candidates. In so doing, we will assess whether social media amplifies particular perspectives, broadens public discourse, or distorts our understanding of the public’s policy preferences.
In our first report, we look at the issues that dominated discussion about the Democratic candidates on Twitter between January 1st and March 8th.
Our team collected tweets mentioning any of the Democratic candidates who were still in the race as of January 1st or that used hashtags relating to the Democratic presidential nomination. We then classified the tweets into 25 issues. Approximately 15% of the roughly 133 million tweets mentioning any of the Democratic candidates or the nomination also mentioned at least one of these 25 issues (see methodology note below).
Civil rights and discrimination topped the list for tweets posted between January 1st and March 8th. Healthcare and the Economy rounded out the top three.
Issue attention is dynamic.
The Democratic debates tended to generate more tweets on the tracked issues. But we also see some ebb and flow in the issues that Twitter users focused on. For example, there was an uptick in tweets about Defense and foreign policy in early January — around the time when a U.S. drone strike killed Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani. But the number of tweets about Defense and foreign policy has come down since then. On the other hand, tweets about Healthcare grew following New Hampshire’s primary.
Further, immigration and trade — two issues that dominated the 2016 election — did not make our Twitter Top 10 list during this time period. Immigration and trade were the 13th and 20th most referenced issues, respectively. Will these issues rise in prominence in the coming months if the candidates start to devote more attention to them in their campaigns? Will other issues rise to the surface instead?
Top Issues and Candidates’ Tweets
Biden and Sanders are tweeting about some of the top issues that are engaging people on Twitter, but some differences are also apparent. Both candidates have tweeted frequently about Civil rights and discrimination, Healthcare, and the Economy. Biden and Sanders have also tweeted about Climate change and Poverty at roughly the same rates. But this is where the similarities stop. Sanders has tweeted more about Economic inequality, Education, and Labor compared to Biden. The former vice president, on the other, has tweeted more about Taxes and Defense and foreign policy than Sanders.
What’s more, when we broaden the scope to all 25 issues, we see that the top two contenders for the Democratic nomination prioritize different issues, including some that did not crack the top 10 in the Twitterverse — Social Security and Immigration — between January 1st and March 8th. Biden has also tweeted a fair amount about threats to democratic norms and the rule of law (Democracy). And Poverty, which made our Twitter Top 10 list, was not among the most popular issues referenced in either Biden’s or Sanders’ tweets during this time period.
We also see clear differences in Biden’s and Sanders’ respective campaign messages. Whereas Biden often evokes the Obama administration’s record and promises to unite the country, Sanders vows to address the needs of the working class and often links their struggles to the disproportionate share of wealth held by the “billionaire class.” Of course, only one of these two will go on to face President Trump in November. As we head toward the general election, we will look to see whether the eventual nominee takes up some of the issue priorities of the other Democratic candidates in a bid to secure greater electoral support.
Which issues will the eventual nominee use to stitch together the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic Party?
Finally, even when the candidates are tweeting about their issue positions and policy promises, President Trump is often mentioned too. Following the 2016 election, some questioned whether Clinton’s focus on Trump harmed her electoral chances and if a greater focus on the issues would’ve helped her campaign. Our initial analysis of the 2020 election – with Trump now the incumbent – suggests that this will not be an either-or proposition. Both candidates bring up Trump when talking about the issues, though Biden is more likely to do so than Sanders.
Forthcoming Reports
As the campaign season progresses, we will look into several other areas of inquiry. In the weeks to come, we will update our Twitter Top 10 list and apply our social curation techniques to the corpus of tweets to assess which issues are generating the most engagement on social media. We will also investigate the emotional characteristics of online discussions about elections and issues.
About one in five Americans say they use Twitter. However, those that use the platform differ from the general electorate in several ways. For example, a recent study, conducted in January by Pew Research Center, shows that Democrats who use Twitter are more liberal and prefer Sanders over Biden than Democrats who are not on the platform. Thus, we will examine whether the issues dominating social media are important to the typical American voter. Other analyses and investigations will focus on the issues in candidates’ advertising campaigns. And we will bring the news media and the role of events into our analysis. For example, do journalists and candidates respond to what they see on Twitter, or do Twitter users respond to what they see in the news or hear from the candidates? How do events, such as the global spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), reshape the issue and election landscape?
We are excited to launch this new project through the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute and to see our students from Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee develop their data and research skills.
About our methodology.
We use the platform Brand Watch (BW) to collect our data from several online sources, although for this first report we focus on Twitter. Our query included a combination of keywords consisting of the candidates’ names (e.g., Bernie Sanders), short forms of the names (e.g., Bernie or Sanders) and the candidates’ Twitter handles (e.g., @berniesanders). The query also included several election-related hashtags (e.g., #2020Election, #DemDebate, #Democrats2020, #Bernie2020). We then classified the search results into each of 25 issues using a dictionary of words that are most likely to occur in the context of each issue. We identified keywords through initial topic modeling of candidates’ tweets and open-ended survey responses and an examination of other issue classification schemas, such as the Comparative Agendas Project and Gallup’s “Most Important Problem” poll series. For example, a tweet was assigned to the Climate change issue if it included words or phrases like “climate,” “global warming,” “green new deal,” or “energy policy.” If, on the other hand, the tweet included words like “defense,” “national security,” or “troops,” it was assigned to the Defense and foreign policy category. A single tweet could be classified as more than one issue if it used keywords from multiple issues. The alphabetized list of 25 issues is below. We will be updating this list as needed in the future.
Abortion
Agriculture
Campaign and election reform
Civil rights and discrimination
Climate change
Crime and law and order
Criminal justice
Defense and foreign policy
Democracy
Drug policy
Economic inequality
Economy
Education
Family policy
Federal deficit
Gun control
Healthcare
Housing
Immigration
Infrastructure
Labor
Poverty
Social Security
Taxes
Trade
Student team members who contributed to this report include Shir Bloch, Ben Garski, and Katie Shanahan.