Rick Santorum won the zero-delegate Twitter primary on Super Tuesday with the two largest spikes in mentions over the course of the night, but his closest competition wasn't fellow candidate Mitt Romney. The silver medal in the most-tweeted competition was a tie between Newt Gingrich and none other than Sarah Palin, whose CNN interview in which she hinted at a run for the White House exacted more interest than the election itself.
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As we've seen time and again, however, the people with the tallest spikes on the tweet-volume graphs are those who inspire the most passion and the most hatred. Our in-house algorithms that measure positive and negative sentiment identify a common pattern: When a candidate takes the stage in a televised speech, an initial spike in positive tweets is quickly accompanied by a negative one as detractors join the commentary.
Mitt Romney's speech registered the highest negative sentiment spike of the night for the four candidates. Surface criticisms touched on his appearance and a few flubs while speaking.
@MattGoldich: Mitt Romney is so boring, he dresses as Jason Sudeikis for Halloween.
@DSHurricane93 : Does Mitt Romney have a speaking problem?
More importantly, the criticisms addressed the substance of his speech. Our quote extraction technology, which measures which statements resonate the most on Twitter, found that Romney's most-shared quote was a humorous paraphrase of his standard stump speech: "I'll do everything opposite of Obama!"
In addition to hashtags expressing support, such as
