Carson, Fiorina failed to leverage social media as their campaigns peaked

[Commentary] A project supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Syracuse University’s Center for Computational and Data Sciences tracks the Twitter and Facebook feeds of active presidential campaigns. The project, Illuminating 2016, looks at the number of messages each candidate sends, and also codes by message type. By doing so, this tool is able to provide details about candidate social-media usage that typically do not register on the mainstream media’s radar.

There are a few strong similarities between the trajectories of the Fiorina and Carson campaigns. Both proudly touted their status as outsiders to politics—Ben Carson as a well-known neurosurgeon and Carly Fiorina as first female CEO of a top-20 US corporation, Hewlett Packard. Both candidates, as shown by the Illuminating 2016 site, likely under-utilized social media when they probably should have used it most. There is no evidence that either candidate’s social media utilization patterns influenced his or her performance in the polls. Comparing their social media behaviors to their performance on the campaign trail, however, does reveal a disparity between social media strategies and what each candidate faced offline.

[Jerry Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University and a summer research assistant on the Illuminating 2016 project.]