The Evolving Issue Landscape in the Democratic Nomination
We will soon shift our issue tracker to follow social media discussion about the match-up between President Trump and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. But before we turn to the general election, it is worth reexamining the last 10 months of the Democratic nomination. To date, we have tracked the issues dominating social media discussion about the Democratic candidates. With the battle for the Democratic nomination effectively over, how did the issue landscape on Twitter change as particular candidates surged and declined and as the field of candidates winnowed?
The Democratic nomination began with a historically diverse and crowded field of candidates. Senator Kamala Harris, pegged as a strong contender among party insiders in the summer of 2019, struggled to break through and ultimately crashed out of the top tier of candidates. Other candidates of color, most notably Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey and former Obama HUD Secretary, Julián Castro, failed to secure enough support in the polls to stay on the debate stage. Booker, Castro, and Harris would all drop out before the end of 2019. Senator Elizabeth Warren surged in the fall of 2019, but was unable to maintain her momentum, particularly as South Bend Mayor, Pete Buttitieg, gained in the polls. Former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, dropped nearly $1 billion on his unsuccessful four-month campaign.
To be sure, former Vice President Joe Biden was the favorite going into the nomination battle, but his support seemed soft – tied more to his name recognition than to any enthusiasm he was generating on the campaign trail. Indeed, Sanders appeared to be the one well-positioned to run away with the nomination after his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Biden’s solid support among black voters in the South helped sustain his candidacy. The other moderate candidates in the field – Buttitieg and Klobuchar – may have helped as well, dropping out before Super Tuesday and endorsing Biden as the candidate best equipped to take on Trump in November. With Sanders unable to translate his strength in fundraising and on social media into broader appeal within the Democratic base, the former vice president would go on to amass a considerable delegate lead in the Super Tuesday states. And on April 8th, following his loss in Wisconsin’s primary, Sanders ended his bid for the Democratic nomination.
What about the issues garnering the most attention in social media? Did they too see a similar ebb and flow? In early 2019, the Voter Survey Group asked survey respondents to assess the importance of 23 issues. They found that Democrats placed the greatest importance on healthcare: nearly 9 out of 10 said the issue was “very important” to them. Immigration, on the other hand, was rated as “very important” by only 37 percent of Democrats. In another effort to pinpoint the relative prioritization among issues, UCLA and the Democracy Fund’s Nationscape project conducted a large-scale conjoint experiment in late 2019. Impeachment was the top revealed priority for Democrats – not surprising given the timing of the study. But across other issues, they found that Democrats placed more importance on immigration-related policies (e.g., ending mass deportations and family separations at the border) than on other issues, including gun control, climate change, or economic policy.
Our issue tracker provides a different lens into the issue landscape. Twitter users are not a representative cross-section of the electorate: they tend to be younger, more liberal, and less compromising about the issues that they care about. However, we can think of Twitter users as part of the active electorate, providing a signal about what the politically interested and motivated want from their nominee. Indeed, recent studies suggest that both political elites and the news media pay attention to the issues raised on social media.
We have tracked tweets referencing any of the Democratic candidates or the nomination process going back to June, 2019. We then classified these tweets into 25 issues, including healthcare, the economy, immigration, and defense and foreign policy.
Social media discussion about the issues spiked during the DNC debates and grew considerably as the primary season got underway. Issues that garnered substantial attention during the 2016 presidential election, such as immigration, never made our top 10 list of issues mentioned in tweets about the Democratic candidates or the nomination. Instead, tweets on civil rights and discrimination dominated all other issues in the first months of 2020 – that is, until the spread of Covid-19 in the United States in early March. Since then, both the volume of tweets about the Democratic nomination and the set of issues referenced have fallen. Healthcare and the economy now dwarf social media discussion about all other issues.