Is Simplicity the key?
On November third, 2020, America voted a new president. Which strategy did the candidates use on Twitter to win the election?
This data visualization examines the sentence structure of the candidates in their tweets based on the punctuation marks used.
The results offer valuable clues about the complexity, amount of words and their tone. How did they approach their followers, did they ask questions or demanded for support and team spirit?
To see our animation take a look at our video demonstration:
What are our conclusions?
In 29 days of analyzing the candidate’s tweets, it is clearly shown, that Trump (287) and Pence (323) tend to use more exclamation marks than the democrats.
They express themselves in short emotional exclamations and callings for their followers the vote for them. Often they use several exclamation marks in a row.
Joe Biden (6) and Kamela Harris (15) try to avoid exclamation marks. When they demand a vote, they often use full stops, which are more conservative.
All candidates nearly never ask questions: Trump (23), Mike Pence (2), Joe Biden (17), Kamela Harris (12). Questions are often leading to a statement the candidates want to point out. They are using Twitter as an additional campaign tool and do not count on real interaction.
We examined the number of commas per tweet to accomplish results on the complicity of the candidates‘ sentences. They tend to use enumerations. So we could not use the numbers of commas for our research about convoluted long sentences. Trump utilized 437 commas in the whole period of 29 days. Biden did use 455 commas.
Trump is the king of Capslock. He wrote 4628 capitals, closely followed by Pence with 4317 commas. Biden (2196) and Harris (1301) are far behind. They only use capitals when they are grammatically needed.
Interesting is also the amount of Content: Biden posted 476 Tweets, Trump 287. Here are only the tweets with their own written text counted. On Trumps Twitter account were multiple Retweets and Quotes, only with the original considerations, written by other users. If these Tweet forms are included in the analysis, Biden only reaches 600 Tweets, and Trump’s Tweet amount would be over 1200.
Watching the Tweets per day leads to the conclusion all candidates posted a lot more during their campaigns before the election days. On Mike Pence’s account, no Tweet was released during the election and in the following days, his average Tweet count declined from 12 before the election to 2-3 Tweets per day.
Our conclusions are: The Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence utilize an emotional tone in their Tweets, with short sentences, Capslock, and exclamation marks. Their form of communication has a lot of fans and supporters. Donald Trump gathered 68 Mio. Likes with 287 Tweets, Joe Biden only 71 Mio. likes with 476 written Tweets. His average likes per Tweets are clearly below Trump’s.
Now Joe Biden was elected by the American people while Trump’s account was banned from Twitter. The data is still stored and gives conclusions and insights in a piece of (internet-) history.
It is designed for HD screen size,
so please use your computer instead of your smartphone.
Data Visualisations can show interesting data collections in a more comprehensible way than tables. This is a student project for university by Michelle Löffelholz and Melina Gross.
Hochschule Hannover
Semester 2020/2021