The Elecurator team shifted to a weekly analysis of online conversations. Read on to see how the topics of conversation shifted for the week of June 15 through June 19.

Our analysis of what people are talking about regarding the 2020 presidential election shows a breathtaking shift over the first six months of 2020 - read on to learn more!

There’s no shortage of news vying for our attention. How have politics, the economy and healthcare influenced the topics of conversations people are having on social media? We analyzed Tweets about President Trump and Joe Biden from January through April 2020 and found that the topics people are talking about fall into three categories: bread and butter issues, major headlines, and third strand stories.

What are bread and butter issues? Major headlines? Third strand stories? Read our post to learn the definitions behind these terms and see a few examples of how we’ve tracked these categories.

There are more than 500 million Tweets per day or more than 6,000 Tweets every second. Check out the methodology we used to make it easier to track topics in the Tweets that we studied for our latest report..

Healthcare was one of the most frequently mentioned issues in tweets about the Democratic Party nomination. This is not surprising. In a YouGov poll conducted in early 2019 for the Voter Study Group, 82 percent of Democrats said that healthcare was a very important issue to them. Going into 2020, we expected to see healthcare emerge as a top issue.

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? What about the issues garnering the most attention in social media? Did they too see a similar ebb and flow? Our issue tracker provides a different lens into the issue landscape.

What were people tweeting during President Trump’s COVID-19 press briefings? Our students @elecurator took a look, gathering all tweets that were posted during each of the president’s briefings on the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11th – the first such declaration since the H1NI “swine flu” outbreak in 2009. The speed with which the crisis has reoriented online discussions about the Democratic nomination is stunning. The timeline of the word clouds below speak louder than any words that we can write (no pun intended!).

The second week of March introduced new issues to election related conversations.

Our animated visualization demonstrates the magnitude of change over seven or eight days. Check out the most frequently occurring words in tweets about Democratic candidates. Words and phrases related to the COVID-19 pandemic are highlighted in purple so you can see how their prevalence changed over the course of the week.