Will #BridgeGate have legs?  Apparently not, if no new revelations come out.  It hasn’t taken long for people to get bored about the topic: talk about Christie on Twitter is already starting to fade, with Saturday, 1/11, having fewer mentions of Christie than Wednesday, when the scandal broke:

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There’s a lot of talk about whether this scandal is the end of Christie’s 2016 ambitions, and with ongoing investigations and possible new revelations it’s impossible to tell how this will all play out.  But one thing is clear: without any new news, people’s attentions are turning elsewhere.  That may help save Christie’s future — by next year the whole thing could just be dismissed as “old news” and people who use it to raise issues of character dismissed as merely grasping at straws.

Unless there’s further damaging revelations, of course…

Twitter is a great way to track what’s on people’s minds, and by looking at tweets that mention cable news shows we can see what’s on people’s minds with regards to current events. And so it’s no surprise that Chris Christie’s “bridgegate” has been dominating the Twitter discussion on Thursday and Friday.

But there was something surprising in the numbers.  MSNBC’s Morning Joe, which normally has a mostly male set of commentators on Twitter, had an unusually high number of mentions in the 8am hour and most of those Twitter mentions were from women.  So that caused me to wonder: Are women more bothered and more motivated to tweet about Bridgegate than men?

Looking back at the recent history (since the first of the year) of tweets that mention cable news shows, I see that about 41% of the tweets are from women.  But when I just look at tweets than mention Christie or #Bridgegate, the proportion of tweets from women grows to 47%.  The boost from 41% to 47% isn’t a big change, but has noticeable effects, as in how it shifted the audience of Twitter mentioners from male to female for one hour of Morning Joe.

Clearly, women are more motivated by the scandal than other topics on average, and any analysis of the impact of Bridgegate that is dominated by men or a male point of view is going to understate its impact.