Updates!

        I just updated the two Twitter spreadsheets (followers and lists) on google docs. Nothing too exciting to report, most candidates saw incremental increases in followers and lists. A good number saw no change at all. The most interesting change, however, was Josh Mandel (R) for State Treasurer. Mandel is running against incumbent Kevin L. Boyce (D). In the course of 13 hours, Mandel dropped 17 followers. Boyce picked up 2 in that time, but still trails Mandel 1671 to 431.

        Here's why I'm really intrigued. According to this "business insider" article, African Americans represent 25% of Twitter users, disproportionately higher than the demographic reality. Intuition might suggest, that Kevin Boyce, as an African American should have a decent twitter following. Not the case. David Pepper (D), running for auditor, has three times as many followers. Auditor and treasurer are not entirely the same position and Pepper (from Cinci) and Boyce (from Cbus) have different bases. Even so, these discrepancies (Boyce-Mandel, Boyce-Pepper) are puzzling.

       It get's crazier. Boyce picked up 36 facebook fans today, Mandel 17. Even so, Mandel leads Boyce on facebook by 3,604 fans. Here's my hypothesis, today is Boyce's brithday (Happy Birthday Mr. Treasurer!). Facebook will tell you when your friends have birthdays, but not people you do not know. Boyce's linked facebook page from his campaign website is HIS facebook page. That is to say, you have to request to be his friend and he may or may not accept you (more on this later). However, if a number of your friends write on the wall of a non-friend third party for something like a birthday, that activity may show up in your news feed. So I believe Boyce's increase in facebook traffic can be attributed to his birthday. Also, this increase in traffic could be from people who requested friendship over the weekend. The distribution of the friend acceptances intermittently with birthday wishes suggests it's a combination of the two.

        This does not explain Boyce's lagging in Twitter or Mandel's Twitter drop. Here's what I think. Race is a critical variable in American politics. One cannot understand American History from a "color-blind" perspective as Stephen Colbert claims to. I don't know, however, how much race factors into twitter followings for a state treasurer. There are some superb comments on the "business insider" article regarding race and social media by "John Grabowski." I pray this is Professor of History John Grabowski who teaches here at Case. In the "comments," he discusses how using ethnicity exclusively to define, categorize or market something is increasingly archaic. Righteous. So despite the "business insider" findings regarding African American Twitter use and ethnicity, I feel it is a leap to assume African Americans would follow Boyce more so than another Democratic politician.

          I think we can also see the trends pointed out by OhMyGov in the GOP hitting social media HARD. This could explain Mandel's lead on both facebook and twitter.

         As to Mandel's twitter drop, I have no idea. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. We'll see what tomorrow brings. It's a pleasant birthday present for the current Treasurer however...

         That's all I've got for now, the dog really needs to go out.

                 I'm going to try and get analysis on the governor's race up tonight. Thanks for reading,

-Alejandro