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A couple of things I’ll point out:

• The mentions for Murphy are a little low because of an overly tight filter.  That will be fixed next month, but the fix doesn’t add much to his counts.
• I left the other GOP contenders out because they have negligible presence on Twitter.
  • Alan Schlesinger got 24 mentions total in the month.
  • I can’t even find a Twitter account for Brian Lara (Twitter helpfully suggests Flo Rida, however).  The guy is a software developer and can’t handle Twitter? Come on, it’s not that hard.
  • Beverly Hires’ personal Twitter account is locked.  Her campaign Twitter account has 4 followers and no tweets.  It has a nice picture, though.  Good luck with that.
• Carl Domino’s burst at the end of the month is almost all negative tweets from the Turnquest camp.
• The democratic incumbent, Patrick Murphy, is still outpacing Calvin Turnquest on Twitter, but I think that the lead is illusionary.  There was a relatively quiet spell in the middle of the month for Turnquest.  Had he sustained activity equally throughout the month, he would have outpaced Murphy with ease.

Some thoughts:

• Domino has no real independent presence on Twitter, and if you don’t show up, your straw-man gets whacked.  For a military guy, he’s getting severely outflanked. We’ve seen this movie before, it’s “Rubio-Crist”, with Carl playing the role of Charlie.
• There’s going to be a pivot sooner rather than later in the public’s perception, because people will start to realize that Turnquest has a great shot at winning in November. A some point there’s going to be a kiss-and-make-up offer from the GOP.

Bottom line: Turnquest is the only GOP candidate who’s got the hustle to win in November. I’ve said that all along, and it’s still true.

In a previous post, I discussed how Charlie Crist is failing to compete on Twitter, allowing Rick Scott to dominate the conversation. It’s a classic case of a challenger not putting out the effort to take on an incumbent.

In Florida’s 18th congressional district, however, we have the opposite: the challenger is exerting the effort necessary to overcome the advantages of his opponent’s incumbency. Calvin Turnquest has virtually matched Rep. Patrick Murphy’s presence on Twitter throughout March:

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In 2012, democrat Patrick Murphy narrowly defeated Allen West by less than 2500 votes to take Florida’s 18th congressional district, and he’s looking to repeat his victory this year in the mid-term elections.  But the closeness of the vote has encouraged a large pool of republican contenders, each who feel that without West’s baggage they could switch the district from D to R.

An early look at the race shows us that, on Twitter at least, all the buzz is around two candidates: the incumbent Murphy and the challenger Calvin Turnquest:

Twitter mentions in FL-18 – Click to Enlarge

The other GOP contenders have plenty of time to ramp up their social media presence, but it is my observations that Mr. Turnquest has a natural fluency with social media that may be hard for them to surpass.  Given how close the last election was, it would do the GOP good to pick a candidate who can reach voters in all channels, and until the others demonstrate a core competency in Social Media, on just the mechanics of politics Mr. Turnquest looks like an early leader.