Mack Dominates Florida Senate Race on Twitter Last Week

Connie Mack IV continued his lead in Twitter last week, with nearly a majority of all tweets about Florida’s US Senate candidates:

Bill Nelson came in second, but far behind Mack.  LeMieux had a fairly small presence, and McCalister having so few tweets recorded that I had to go back and review it by hand to make sure my program didn’t have a bug!

When you look at the daily mentions, you can see how last week played out:

Connie Mack’s spike on 4/24 appears to be from two things: (1) many retweets of his congratulatory tweet to Romney for winning the primary, and (2) comments about his appearance on Chuck Todd’s show on MSNBC where Mack refused to say how he’d vote on student loans.  A lot of those comments were not positive.

Still, by dominating the news, Connie Mack is sucking the oxygen out of the GOP primary race.  That’s one of the advantages of holding a similar office — Mack is relevant today on issues that the winner of the race will confront next year.

Tweetdown: Sean Hannity vs. Rachel Maddow

Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow square off against each other at the 9pm slot on cable. Both are active on Twitter, with Sean having 293,137 followers and Rachel having 2,064,375 — about 7 times as many.  So who gets mentioned the most on Twitter?  Would you bet Rachel does?

I did a count of all tweets mentioning either one of them throughout the day of 3/19/2012 (eastern time), and here’s the results:

Sean Hannity definitely benefits from having both a radio show as well as a TV show.  According to Wikipedia, Rachel’s last Air America radio show was in January 2010, and so she only has the TV show to drive Twitter participation.

Still, given the large follower advantage that Rachel has, it’s surprising that Sean’s followers still generate nearly twice the activity!