DNC Speech Map: Michelle Obama Dominates Night One, Deval Patrick a Retweet Breakout
For the Republican Convention, we tracked social media reactions to the main speakers, comparing overall and highly favorable (er, “Awesome!”) reactions to the key lines from the speech, and put it into something we’re calling a speech map. We’ve put together a similar visualization of the Democratic convention for three of last night’s most popular speakers — Michelle Obama, Julian Castro, and Deval Patrick:
Not surprisingly, Michelle Obama dominated the social media conversation on night one, receiving 367,801 overall mentions last night to keynoter Julian Castro’s 90,468 and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s 60,242.
Michelle Obama’s advantage translates when looking at delivering memorable speech lines: over two thirds of these mentions went to the First Lady, and she netted four times as many quotations as Castro, who shared the 10pm hour with her. Though overall mentions have far outpaced those for the Republican National Convention (we believe this has more to do to with the Twitter demographic than the content), Castro did not deliver as many breakout speech lines as GOP keynoter Chris Christie the week before.
Deval Patrick’s barnburner highlights how an undercard convention speaker can gain momentum. Patrick was not slated to speak in primetime, and lagged behind Castro in overall mentions, but was found very quotable by the social media audience (20% of Patrick’s tweets were quotes compared to 12% for Michelle Obama). Quotes from Patrick’s speech also had a longer-half life, lasting well into the second hour, suggesting the lingering effect of viral retweets versus people who had watched the speech.
Possibly our favorite metric is the Awesome Index. How many times did someone use the word “awesome” in describing a speaker? Here, Patrick was only a little bit behind the First Lady, who led 1,476 to 1,143, with Castro netting 676 awesome shoutouts.
Here were the top 10 lines from the first night of the Democratic convention:
- “I have seen first hand that being president doesn’t change who you are. No, it reveals who you are.” – Michelle Obama, 14,407 mentions
- “He believes women are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and our Healthcare.” – Michelle Obama, 11,310 mentions
- “Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it.” – Michelle Obama, 7,624 mentions
- “It’s time for democrats to grow a backbone and stand up for what we believe.” – Deval Patrick, 6,998 mentions
- “My mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.” – Julian Castro, 6,785 mentions
- “I will not stand by and let him be bullied out of office, and neither should you.” – Deval Patrick, 3,288 mentions
- “We were so young, so in love, and so in debt.” – Michelle Obama, 2,548 mentions
- “Success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.” – Michelle Obama, 2,235 mentions
- “Mitt Romney has undergone an extreme makeover, and it ain’t pretty.” – Julian Castro, 1,785 mentions
- “We learned about dignity and decency, that how hard you work means more than how much you make, that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.” – Michelle Obama, 1,495 mentions
With research by David Engstrom





