The Fourth GOP Debate: Going Beyond Mentions

In our last report, we analyzed the set of tweets about the third Republican primary debate to learn about viewers' impressions of the candidates as the drama unfolded – and how those impressions could emerge even before a media consensus formed about the night's " winners " and " losers. " We repeated our analysis using 426,717 tweets from the fourth debate, hosted by Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal Tuesday night (specifically, those with the hashtags " #gopdebate " , " #fbngopdebate " , or " #RepublicanDebate "). What we found highlights the importance of looking beyond mere " mentions " of names and keywords when studying political discussions on Twitter. Take Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose performance yesterday has garnered mixed reviews. How often was he mentioned? According to the figure below, he rose from the middle of the pack in terms of tweets per minute by Republicans to be the second most talked-about candidate by the end, at the 11:00 mark, behind Sen. Ted Cruz. This was a substantial increase in mentions for Kasich over the interest he generated in the previous debate. We also note that in this debate Ben Carson went in as the Republican frontrunner according to many polls, and a key expectation of the debate was that Carson would have to defend his biography. However, comparing the mentions of Carson by Republicans in this debate with the previous debate, we can see that this did not translate to increased mentions.