ECU Poll: Yang and Buttigieg the big winners from last night’s debate according to Twitter

East Carolina University’s Center for Survey Research (CSR) released results today from a Twitter analysis taken during the Democratic national debate on Oct. 15. CSR collected more than 240,000 tweets (of which 129,019 could be categorized as positive or negative for a specific candidate) made during the hours of the debate. Using sentiment analysis to calculate a ratio of positive to negative tweets for each of the 10 candidates, Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg came out on top.

Yang and Buttigieg received the most positive sentiment from Twitter and also generated a reasonable degree of interest, with a total number of 13,068 tweets and 12,092 tweets, respectively. Only the front runners, Elizabeth Warren (24,032), Joe Biden (15,921) and Bernie Sanders (14,051) had a higher number of tweets, although the sentiment of those tweets was less positive when compared to Yang and Buttigieg. Cory Booker generated the third most positive ratio of tweets during the debate but had only 7,691 tweets, which ranked eighth out of the 12 candidates.