Bernie Sanders, the Groundswell Candidate

Outside of school and work, my big passions revolve around law and politics. For my social media monitoring project I wanted to look at a presidential candidate.  Specifically, I decided to look at the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, which begs the question: Who is Bernie Sanders?

Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders is currently serving as one of the two senators from the state of Vermont. He is a self described democratic socialist who caucuses with the Democrat party.  According to his campaign site, which is located at https://berniesanders.com, his major stances on the policy issues include addressing income inequality, getting money out of politics, equal rights for all, immigration reform, higher education reform, and military reform focusing on increased medical services for veterans.

Candidates in Mainstream Media

Presidential campaigns don't take place in a vacuum, and the best point of comparison for any campaign is the other candidates. Using Google Trends, we can compare the overall search interest during the past year of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. 

As you can see from the graph, Bernie Sanders is doing fairly well and competing closely with Hillary Clinton who is his biggest competitor for the Democratic candidacy, but both are massively overshadowed by the massive media sensation that is the Donald Trump campaign. Let's look at some other analytics focusing on the Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential Campaign.

What you can see from these analytics found on socialmention is that while Bernie Sanders doesn't historically have a huge range of influence, and has an average chance of being mentioned, amongst those who follow him there's a massively passionate group.  One interesting mention of note goes back to the August 7th GOP Presidential Debate, where Senator Sanders livetweeted the debate, and had the most retweeted tweet of the entire debate with:

It's over. Not one word about economic inequality, climate change, Citizens United or student debt. That's why the Rs are so out of touch.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 7, 2015

 Sanders has proven that he understands Twitter, or at least someone within his campaign does, with the campaign slogan/hashtag "#feelthebern" being a rallying cry for supporters on twitter, and according to meltwater icerocket at the time of writing this is averaging 13.8 posts per minute on twitter while "Bernie Sanders" is averaging 66 mentions a minute.

The Bernie Sanders campaign is definitely here to stay, and with the first Democrat debate coming up, it's highly likely that Sander's mentions and social media presence and buzz are going to skyrocket.  It will be interesting to see what the debate does for his campaign.