Last updated on June 3rd, 2012 at 12:57 am
Mitt Romney may have the Citizens United cash, but he is being absolutely routed on Twitter where Barack Obama’s followers outnumbers his 15 million+ to 500,000+.
Here is the infographic:
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
As you can see Obama is dominant on Twitter. President Obama and his supporters have over ten times the amount of pull on Twitter as does Romney. This is important because the social media application that the mainstream media and cable news have most integrated into their programming is Twitter. Nearly every show on cable news has integrated Twitter into their program. Since the conservatively biased mainstream media won’t cover Obama and the Democratic Party’s message, ofter their best chance to get their side of things on to cable news is through a well placed Tweet.
Obama’s sizable Twitter advantage is also valuable for grassroots organization and messaging. Fifteen million followers is a lot of potential message dissemination, and the 52% of the president’s followers that are located in the United States equal million of potential donors, voters, and volunteers. These are numbers that Romney will never be able to match. Twitter follower size can also be seen as a benchmark of enthusiasm for the candidate. The fact that Romney as the Republican nominee has only been able to acquire a half a million Twitter followers speaks volumes about the Republican Party’s continued lukewarm support for him.
All of this is not a prediction of anything to come, but it is clear that Obama social media and ground operations remain strong, and in what could be a very close election, those volunteers on the ground, and those tweets imploring others to go vote could be the difference between victory and defeat.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
