Category Archives: Rick Scott

The State of Florida’s 2014 Gubernatorial Race on Twitter

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With Alex Sink deciding to drop out of the race for governor, it’s worth taking a look at how the other potential candidates have been doing over the past few months:

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What’s interesting is how much of the steam has gone out of Twitter for all but Rick Scott.  Charlie Crist has been appearing at a bunch of local events, but without making a formal announcement he’s flying under the radar.  Nan Rich is still not igniting passion on social media.  That leaves it open for Rick Scott to define the topics of the conversation and to wait for the economy to further improve.  It seems to me that the longer Crist waits, the stronger Scott gets. 

 

Florida’s 2014 Governor Race on Twitter, April & May 2013

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The range of possible candidates for Florida’s 2014 gubernatorial race continues to grow even as many of the potential candidates remain coy about their intentions.  But most are not just playing coy, they’re playing dead on Twitter, judging by activity over the past two months:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Only current governor Rick Scott has an ongoing, regular pulse on Twitter; the rest have a brief moment of activity and settle back down into quiet.

Other than the first wave of speculation about Bill Nelson’s candidacy it’s been fairly quiet for him.  I will  add Pam Iorio this month and will have her data starting with the June charts.  So far, though, she’s not creating a big impact on Twitter.

As you can see from the charts, only Will Weatherford and Charlie Crist have an ongoing ability to generate talk on a level similar to Rick Scott.  With the state’s legislative season coming to an end, it will be interesting to see if Weatherford continues to generate conversation or disappears back into the noise.

And poor Nan Rich — even though she is more or less the only declared democratic candidate she can’t get a break from the party or from Twitter.  I’ll look at her candidacy on Twitter in more detail later on this month.

Florida Governor’s Race on Twitter, March 2013

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March is in the history books.  How did Twitter treat our much talked about gubernatorial possibles? Here’s the frequency of Twitter mentions for each of them:

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Rick Scott still dominates Twitter — as the sitting governor, you’d expect that.  Charlie Crist is doing pretty well in mentions.  Perhaps rumors of his announcing a run at the Kennedy King dinner in May will drive his mentions higher in April?

The rest of them … only Will Weatherford is doing well (spoiler: on 4/2 Adam Putnam’s tweet about Florida’s 500 got a lot of play — we’ll see if that gives him a bump that lasts). The rest of the rest, not so well…

One thing that’s amazing — Rick Scott has this weird regular pulse to his mentions.  Here’s a longer term view of Scott’s mentions on Twitter:

Rick Scott's Heartbeat? Click to enlarge

Rick Scott’s Heartbeat? Click to enlarge

I ran this through a FFT (Fast-Fourier Transform) which shows the dominant frequencies in the Twitter activity:

2013-04-02_23-16-21

What we see is that Twitter activity for Rick Scott tends to be clustered on a 4-day and a 7-day cycle.  Eyeballing the (previous) chart, you can see the weekly cycle at work.  One has to wonder if this isn’t some strange way governor’s office works — do they just send out news on Tuesdays and Fridays?  I’m not sure — I’ll dig into this next month if this keeps up!

 

Medicaid aids Scott on Twitter in February 2013

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February was shaping up to be a quiet month on Twitter for Florida’s sitting governor, Rick Scott, and his possible contenders … until Scott announced his support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion:

Guess when Scott OK’ed Medicaid? Click on image to enlarge.

 

Well that certainly set the agenda for the next week!  Interestingly, sentiment on Twitter was positive, on balance (though sentiment is notoriously hard to measure accurately).

What about the rest of the possible 2014 contenders for Scott’s office?  It’s hard to see them as more than noise after Medicaid, but if you take Scott out of the picture you can see a bit more about how they’re performing:

For Crist, it was Greer and Bear it. Click to enlarge

For Crist, it was Greer and Bear it. Click to enlarge

Charlie Crist got a lot of activity early in the month in relation to Jim Greer’s trial and guilty plea.  Alex Sink made some news where she stepped back from the race.  And Will Weatherford, speaker of Florida’s house, suddenly became a contender for 2014 as a primary challenger against Scott (H/T St. PetersBlog.  NB: The stats here only started tracking him as of 2/23).  For Nan Rich, unfortunately, Twitter is still mostly terra incognita.

It’s still too early to draw any conclusions — but it’s interesting to see that for both Crist and Scott, a lot of Twitter activity was controversial in nature. Will Scott controlled the timing of his announcement, it’s clear that the conversations about both Crist and Scott are being driven by external events.  Let’s see if, over time, they can start to define their own narrative on Twitter.

Who Rick Scott Follows on Twitter is Completely Irrelevant. Ce n’est pas un faux pas.

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I was amused (and annoyed) to see a somewhat excited news article entitled “Gov. Scott’s Twitter Faux Pas“.  The article suggests that because Governor Rick Scott’s twitter account follows some possibly unsavory Twitter accounts it’s “curious” and “plain disturbing”. And it goes on to urgently recommend that

[…] someone on his staff should monitor everyone who follows him and everyone he follows. Any offensive or questionable account should immediately be unfollowed, and the user should be blocked from following him. It’s Twitter 101, people.

I’ll give the writer some benefit of the doubt — she says she hasn’t been able to get through to the Governor’s staff to find out why he follows all those accounts.  But in turn, the writer should have given the Governor the benefit of the doubt, too.

Because it’s easy to see what’s happening without having to ask: Rick Scott’s official account is followed by 34,160 Twitter users.  Of those, his account follows 21,514 back.  In the other direction, Rick Scott’s official account follows 24,001 Twitter users. Of those, 21,514 follow him back.  In other words, Rick Scott’s official twitter account has obviously automatically followed back anyone who followed him — right up until the point that he hit the limit of followers that Twitter would allow him.

So, despite the article’s author’s excitement that Rick Scott’s account follows an alleged porn account, there is nothing more than mindless automation at work.  Rick Scott is not scanning all 24K accounts he follows for a salacious tweet out of the tens of thousands his list generate every day.

Now, is it really Twitter 101 that Rick Scott needs to have someone spend time weeding out the one or two unsavory followers? Let’s be clear, as a Florida taxpayer, I do not want Rick Scott to spend my money on having state employees scrubbing Twitter’s lists of users.  Let Twitter do that themselves.  So, no.  No state employees need to do this. Rick Scott may have many faults, but wasting taxpayer money is generally not one that comes to top of mind.

As for the suggestion that these unsavory followers “should be blocked from following [the governor],” I have to ask, why?  Does the writer not know of Florida’s sunshine laws? Blocking someone from following you is the same as blocking them from reading you.  That seems completely at odds with the principles of transparent government, doesn’t it? Yes it does.

Let’s all remember Twitter 102: Follows != endorsements.  The governor can put that on his Twitter profile, if that will help people remember that rule.

In the mean time, can we get back to the issues that confront our state?  Because who Rick Scott follows is not one of those issues.