Will Sanders Supporters Jump Ship for Trump? Fine-grained Analysis of Twitter Followers

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter follower data to assess Bernie Sanders supporters' likelihood of switching allegiance to Donald Trump, revealing temporal trends and gender differences in supporter behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis combining time-series Twitter data with neural network gender classification to understand supporter switching behavior.

Findings

Increasing Sanders followers are following Trump over time.

Men are more likely to switch to Trump than women.

Supporter switching patterns vary over the studied period.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the likelihood of Bernie Sanders supporters voting for Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton. Building from a unique time-series dataset of the three candidates' Twitter followers, which we make public here, we first study the proportion of Sanders followers who simultaneously follow Trump (but not Clinton) and how this evolves over time. Then we train a convolutional neural network to classify the gender of Sanders followers, and study whether men are more likely to jump ship for Trump than women. Our study shows that between March and May an increasing proportion of Sanders followers are following Trump (but not Clinton). The proportion of Sanders followers who follow Clinton but not Trump has actually decreased. Equally important, our study suggests that the jumping ship behavior will be affected by gender and that men are more likely to switch to Trump than women.