The Fourth GOP Debate: Going Beyond Mentions

Summary

Similar to our previous report, we again want to measure viewers’ impressions of presidential candidates in real time. We also want to see how those impressions emerge even before a media consensus forms about the night’s “winners” and “losers.”

We repeat our analysis using 426,717 tweets from the fourth debate, hosted by Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, specifically those with relevant hashtags. We find that one must look beyond just “mentions” of names and keywords when studying political discussions on Twitter.