The Miami Herald has an article today saying that Connie Mack IV’s campaign is fizzling out. As evidence of this, they quote a few party insiders (many unnamed) and look at some very early fundraising reports.
When I look at what’s happening on Twitter, though, I call bullshit.
Let’s start with how much each of the candidates has tweeted lately:
Click on image to enlarge
What we see is that McCalister is still not very active (we last looked at the three of them about three weeks ago), but LeMieux and Mack are fairly comparable in their activity.
So, how does the Twitterverse respond to them?
Click on Image to Enlarge
Well, maybe if Connie Mack’s wife Mary was running for Senate in Florida we could call it a lackluster campaign, since her mentions are between LeMieux’s and McCalister’s. But since it’s the Mr. and not the Mrs. who’s running, we can see that on Twitter the Mack Attack is dominating the rest of them.
Maybe the Miami Herald should escape the Brie and Chablis set and find out what’s really happening. Because compared to his two opponents, Connie Mack is on fire.
Methodology & Notes:
Some important things to remember:
- I retrieved all tweets sent by the three candidates since 1/1/2012 to get a general level of their twitter activity.
- I retrieved all tweets sent by others in the past week that mentioned @ConnieMackIV, @RepConnieMack, @George_LeMieux, or @McCalister4FL. Including RepConnieMack in the list had almost no effect on the results.
- Because of #2, Bill Nelson, Mary Bono Mack, and Mitt Romney were only counted in tweets that also included at least one of the candidates. In other words, I did not go looking for these folks, they just showed up when our three GOP contenders were discussed.
- Twitter popularity is not a scientific poll. But I bet it’s a lot more accurate than asking a few grumpy insiders what they think!
- Just in case all the tweets about Connie were “hey, he’s losing his luster”, I read through them all. Virtually all of his mentions were supporters.