Twitter Activity in Florida’s 18th in April, 2014: The Dominoes are falling in Turnquest’s favor

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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.