Hardly a day passes without a new survey from national pollsters reflecting our changing attitudes about Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney. With more than five months to the general election, this is already getting tiresome — even to a bit of a political junkie.
Several months ago, during the heat of the Republican primary season, one research organization attempted to measure the candidates’ use of social media to pick a winner. In hindsight, the results were very inconclusive at best.
But undeterred, another group has compared Obama’s and Romney’s Twitter-only following. Here’s a look at some of the results.
- Obama has almost 16 million Twitter followers, while Romney counts just over 500,000. Nearly half of the Obama followers live outside of the country. About 90 percent of Romney’s live in the U.S.
- About seven of 10 Romney followers are men. Obama’s followers are split fairly evenly between the sexes.
- Based on percentages, Romney followers are wealthier. Obama’s are younger.
- The top industries represented by Obama’s followers are hospitality, law and marketing/PR. Romney draws more support from followers employed in the fields of software, insurance and fashion.
- The influence of each candidate’s followers (as judged by connections across 60 social media sites) give a clear edge to Obama with a “pull” measurement of 5,461, compared to Romney followers and their 466 rating. Yet while Obama has about 30 times the number of followers, they only have about 12 times more pull than Romney’s.
There is even more detail in the report, including a look at swing state followers. So what does this all mean? How do these numbers translate into electability? I doubt anyone can say with certainty. But it does provide us with one more set of statistics to debate.
But before we learn the winner on Nov. 6, I think we’ll all be begging for relief.
– JD
Twitter: @Jdaum
