Want to gauge how popular a speaker is at a convention? Sure, you can listen to the response they receive from the crowds in Charlotte and Tampa—though that can be grossly unscientific, as standing ovations and chants have become almost Pavlovian at these events. A more accurate—and modern—way? Look at Twitter. The social media juggernaut provided stats throughout the Democratic and Republican National Conventions about how many tweets per minute each major speaker received during their remarks. Did Obama beat Romney? Was Michelle’s speech more popular than Bill’s? Take a look at the rankings of the major convention speakers by their popularity in the Twitterverse.
It should come as no surprise that Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night set a new record for political moments on Twitter. At the peak, there were 52,757 tweets per minute about the president’s remarks. He started off with a self-deprecating joke about his relentless campaigning: “If you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me—so am I.” He lashed out at Republican policies for ignoring new ideas. “Feel a cold coming on?” he said. “Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!” Of course, it was his rousing grand finale that brought a response so deafening from the crowd, you could barely hear his conclusion. “America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder—but it leads to a better place. Yes our road is longer—but we travel it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up.”
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President Obama predicted he’d cry when he watched his wife speak on Tuesday night, but could he have predicted just how powerful the first lady’s address would be? Michelle Obama wowed the crowd in Charlotte and those watching at home with her speech Tuesday night, kicking off the Democratic National Convention. At the peak, there were 28,003 tweets per minute about her remarks—more than Bill Clinton’s and Mitt Romney’s. The first lady spoke about the concerns she had when her husband first considered running for president. “I loved the life we had built for our girls and I deeply loved the man I had built that life with, and I didn’t want that to change if he became president,” she said. “Well, today, after so many struggles and triumphs and moments that have tested my husband in ways I could never have imagined, I have seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are. No, it reveals who you are.” The crowd cheered emphatically when Obama emphasized that her husband “knows the American dream because he’s lived it,” and that “for Barack, success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.” She closed out her speech, and the first night of the convention, to a standing ovation by telling the crowd, “I didn’t think that was possible, but let me tell you today, I love my husband even more than I did four years ago, even more than I did 23 years ago, when we first met.”
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Close behind Michelle was Bill Clinton. The former president reached a peak of 22,087 tweets per minute during his lengthy ad-libbed speech. The key lines that elicited the most reaction online were when he touted the president’s job record and praised him for appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of State, even after their brutal battle for the 2008 presidential nomination, noting: “Democracy doesn’t have to be a blood sport. It can be an honest enterprise.” The twitterverse also went wild for such lines as “We believe ‘we’re all in this together’ is a far better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own,’” and “It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did,” referring to Paul Ryan calling Obama’s Medicare savings “the biggest, coldest power play.”
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Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was the subject of 9,161 tweets per minute when he entered the Republican National Convention hall in Tampa last week, but his peak number of tweets was 14,289. Moments that got the crowd particularly fired up include Romney’s shout-out to the recently departed Neil Armstrong, recalling that Ann and he watched the moon landing in her parents’ living room and went to bed that night “knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.” Romney even got some laughs from the audience, especially when he pointed out that when he first started Bain Capital, he considered asking his church’s pension fund for money but didn’t. “I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors money, but I didn’t want to go to hell, too,” he said. Romney got one of the biggest rounds of applause when he declared, “As president I’ll protect the sanctity of life, I’ll honor the institution of marriage.”
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The DNC’s keynote speaker really moved the crowd of Tuesday night. Newcomer Julian Castro’s peak number of Twitter mentions hit 11,503 during his speech, a testament to his impact on the audience. The San Antonio mayor was the first Latino to deliver a keynote address at a major party convention, and the story of his immigrant family’s rise to political prominence was truly inspirational. Castro, the youngest mayor of one of the 50 biggest cities in the U.S., made the crowd go wild with such lines as, “When it comes to expanding access to good health care, Mitt Romney...actually Mitt Romney said, ‘Yes,’ and now he says, ‘No.’” But the audience really roared when Castro said, “The American dream is not a sprint or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on the fruits of their labor.”
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Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s speech at the Democratic National Convention peaked at 7,502 tweets per minute. The most rousing part? When he led the crowd in the chant “President Obama is moving America forward, not back.” Moving forward was a major theme of his speech: “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan now say they want to take America back. And so we ask: back to what? Back to the failed policies that drove us into a deep recession? Back to the days of record job losses?” O’Malley asked. “No, thank you. I don’t want to go back.” His appearance at the convention came amid speculation that O’Malley is positioning himself for a 2016 run at the presidency. “To borrow a catchphrase from his address,” said one Maryland county executive, “his career is moving forward, not back.”
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Deval Patrick used his unique vantage point as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney’s home state, to make a call to arms to Democratic voters to reelect President Obama. “Mitt Romney talks a lot about the things he’s fixed,” he said. “I can tell you Massachusetts was not one of them.” Patrick is a longtime friend of Obama, a relationship that was evident in his speech. “The list of accomplishments is long, impressive, and barely told,” he said. “With a record like that and a vision that powerful and hopeful, I will not stand by and let him be bullied out of office—and neither should you.” At its peak, Patrick’s fierce defense of the president received 6,909 tweets per minute, more than vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s address.
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Paul Ryan’s status as the Republican ticket’s vice presidential candidate should have made him one of the highest-profile speakers at either convention, but two governors (Martin O’Malley, Deval Patrick) and a mayor (Julian Castro) received more attention than he did on Twitter. Ryan’s address peaked at 6,669 tweets per minute. Aiming at the American everyman, he highlighted his roots as a small-town boy who lives “on the same block where I grew up,” and talked about his mother as an example of the American entrepreneurial spirit. He managed to inspire a “USA! USA!” chant from the crowd after this line: “The United States is still the greatest force for peace and liberty that this world has ever known.”
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Sandra Fluke undeniably emerged as one of the Democratic convention’s breakout stars. Her speech earned an impressive 6,863 tweets per minute—admirable for a speaker who was only recently thrust onto the national stage. Fluke, who became a folk hero after Rush Limbaugh labeled her a “slut” for defending health insurance coverage of birth control for women, received several standing ovations during her address. America has a choice, she said, between an “on offensive, obsolete relic of our past” run by “a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs” and who “won’t stand up to the extremes in his party.” President Obama, she said, looks at that same woman and “instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here—and give me a microphone—to amplify our voice.” That last remark received a rousing response from the Charlotte crowd.
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Elizabeth Warren, who is running a tight race against Sen. Scott Brown for Ted Kennedy’s old Massachusetts Senate seat, said she wanted to live in an America “where no one can steal your purse on Main Street or your pension on Wall Street.” Her remarks received 6,472 tweets per minute as she chided Romney for saying “corporations are people, my friend.” Her big line: “No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die.”
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As far as first ladies go, Michelle Obama wins the Twitter showdown. Her speech received more than four times the tweets as Ann Romney’s, which had a high of 6,195 tweets per minute on the first day of the Republican convention. Romney’s remarks specifically appealed to women—at one point, she even shouted, “I love women!” She also received a loud ovation for her remarks about her marriage. “I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a ‘storybook marriage.’ Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer,” she said. “A storybook marriage? No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage.”
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Chris Christie’s keynote at the Republican convention received almost half as many tweets as Julian Castro’s at the Democratic convention the next week. His remarks earned a peak of 6,079 tweets per minute. Christie touted his leadership “in a blue state with a conservative Republican governor” as an example of the necessity—and feasibility—of bipartisan governing. He laid out the sharp divide between Democrats and Republicans, saying, “Our ideas are right for Americans, and their ideas have failed America.” To a cheering crowd at the conclusion of his speech, he encouraged the audience “to stand up for Mitt Romney.”
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