Newt Gingrich has suspended his campaign, Rick Santorum has reached his limit and Mitt Romney has won the title of presumptive Republican presidential nominee. (Assuming that Ron Paul's delegate strategy comes up short.) Now as a two man race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, we can compare the candidates' platforms, promises and platitudes. And since it is now 2012 we can compare the candidates' Twitter feeds. Very serious business...
Crunching the Candidates' Twitter Feeds
On this site, I have been collecting our elected officials' Tweets since May 2011 (149,000 tweets and counting), including the tweets from President Obama's and Governor Romney's official accounts. With this data and a little bit of Python code I've crunched the numbers and provide a comparison of the two candidates below.
The two tables show the words used most frequently by Mitt Romney but least likely to be typed by Barack Obama (and vice versa). I think the analysis shows an interesting contrast. Check out a similar breakdown of I did of Democrats & Republicans.
Disclaimer
Let's not kid ourselves, these accounts are most likely run by trained communication staffers, not by the President and Governor. Nonetheless, this can show campaign themes and priorities that may be relevant to us voters.
These terms are more often found in Governor Romney's Tweets
| Term | Obama Occurances | Romney Occurances | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| debate | 0 | 39 | -100% |
| ann | 0 | 23 | -100% |
| updates | 1 | 20 | -91% |
| great | 3 | 51 | -89% |
| barackobama | 7 | 90 | -86% |
| tune | 2 | 19 | -82% |
| video | 6 | 44 | -77% |
| tonight | 3 | 19 | -74% |
| america | 11 | 43 | -61% |
| jobs | 11 | 38 | -57% |
These terms are more often found in President Obama's Tweets
| Term | Obama Occurances | Romney Occurances | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| buffetrule | 33 | 0 | 100% |
| congress | 29 | 0 | 100% |
| ilikeobamacare | 25 | 0 | 100% |
| aca | 24 | 0 | 100% |
| student | 21 | 0 | 100% |
| health | 31 | 1 | 93% |
| middle | 20 | 1 | 90% |
| care | 20 | 1 | 90% |
| progress | 21 | 2 | 81% |
| women | 35 | 4 | 78% |
What did I analyze?
Mitt Romney has tweeted 529 times, while Barack Obama has tweeted over 2000 times. To level the field I only considered the past 529 tweets from the President. I used a modified Python script that can be found on Bitbucket.org, which I adapted from this open source code, to breakdown the tweets.