TN Senate candidates just as close on Twitter as in polls
Source: WDEF – Nashville
Posted by Brandon Boatwright
Early polls in the Senate race in Tennessee show just how close both candidates are leading up to Election Day. As Republican Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Phil Bredesen vie for a highly contested and equally significant congressional seat, the New York Times recently reported on how social media factors in to some of the most important races leading up to the 2018 Midterms.
The report found that Blackburn got 77,000 more interactions on Facebook over a 30-day period than Bredesen. Alternatively, Bredesen has an overwhelming lead on Instagram, where he got more than three times as many likes and comments as Blackburn.
Source: The New York Times
Twitter analysis was not included in the New York Times article, but with data from the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center, we we able to harvest the number of tweets over the same 30-day span.
The pie chart below shows that 54.4% of the Twitter conversation between the two candidates relates to Bredesen, whereas 45.6% of the conversation is about Blackburn.
The divide in Twitter conversation between Tennessee Senate candidates.
Using Social Studio’s sentiment analysis feature, we were also able to determine the emotional temperature surrounding each of the candidates. Conversation about Blackburn yielded 39.2% positive mentions, 33.6% negative, and 27.2% neutral. Chatter about Bredesen was slightly different. Of the more than 420k mentions about the democratic challenger, 38.2% were negative, 32.7% were positive, and 29.1% were neutral.
As the campaign continues to unfold, we’ll continue to monitor the online chatter around both candidates.