If the Twitter (News - Alert) universe had an electoral vote, it would cast its ballot for Ron Paul. A new Pew Research study that examined the tone of more than 20 million tweets about presidential candidates found that the Texas congressman has received general positive reviews.
Meanwhile, Paul's GOP competition – including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry – has been blasted by the majority of Twitter users, each receiving more negative reviews than positive ones over the last six months.
The news is especially eye-opening considering Paul trails by a significant margin in the majority of polls, with most political analyst believing that he has only a sliver of a chance to earn the Republican nomination.
The study, which assessed the tone of tweets and online messages from May 2 to November 27, found that 55 percent of assertions made about Paul were positive, representing the highest level of support in the study. Even more impressive, only 15 percent of Paul-related tweets were negative, by far the lowest of any candidate.
Twitter isn't quite so sunny of a place for the rest of the GOP candidates, whose negative tweets outweighed their positive ones by a 2-1 margin.
Libertarian supporters should also know that Paul enjoys more positive support in the blogosphere than any other candidate. Paul's biggest problem is traditional media outlets, which provide him with less coverage than any other Republican candidate with the exception of Rick Santorum.
So the real question is: Does Ron Paul have a hidden underbelly of support, or do Tea Party fanatics just have too much time on their hands? I guess we will have to wait and see.
The other interesting part of the study concerns Newt Gingrich, who experienced a huge shift in Twitter support toward the latter part of the year. The former House Speaker achieved his first week of more positive tweets than negative ones on Oct. 24.
His closest rivals, on the other hand, have seen their numbers swing the other way. Romney, Perry and Herman Cain – who pulled himself from the race over the weekend – experienced their most negative Twitter reviews in the last eight weeks.
Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
