React: A Social Data Analysis of the Night Trump Became President-Elect

Donald Trump will be President. Social media is reeling. We’ve tried to make sense of it all.

In the early hours of Wednesday 9th November, Donald Trump declared victory. It was the end of a seemingly never-ending election cycle that started over a year ago with a multitude of candidates running for each party’s nomination, an abundance of fiery debates, and a final dirty battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

With the news in, we’ve taken a look back at the social data from Election day. If you want to look a little further back check out our political articles here and our live US election data viz here.

30k tweets in a minute as Trump declares victory

Breaking it down minute-by-minute from 6pm ET last night, the declaration of victory caused a spike of around 30k tweets mentioning Trump at 2:43am.

One might have expected a bigger reaction given that Trump has previously garnered similar numbers of tweets during debates. (But those debates weren’t happening at 3am).

On Election Day, like most of the election cycle, Trump received more mentions than Clinton.

She only overtook once (around 8pm when a number of states announced their results). Between the start of November 8th and November 9th at 1:30am EST Trump accumulated in excess of 4.9 million mentions while Clinton’s count stood at over 2.7 million.

To give a sense of the global scale of the conversation, here are geo-tagged tweets mentioning the candidates in the ten minutes following that 30k peak in Trump mentions.

A look at the tweeters

Given that the world was watching, we broke down the tweets by who was talking about the candidates.

Gender-wise, there were more male individuals than female individuals tweeting about the two candidates, but females out-tweeted males when discussing Hillary Clinton.

There were 8% more tweets about Trump coming from male authors than female authors.

According to the BBC, “male voters were much more likely to back Mr Trump, while women backed Mrs Clinton by a double-digit margin.”

The top tweets

Clinton’s messages did very well on Twitter, and gaining far more retweets than her opponent who was fairly quiet on the social network during Election day.

This team has so much to be proud of. Whatever happens tonight, thank you for everything. pic.twitter.com/x13iWOzILL

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 9, 2016

Watching the returns at 9:45pm. #ElectionNight #MAGA?? pic.twitter.com/HfuJeRZbod

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2016

Associated Press got a solid 100k retweets on their announcement tweet.

BREAKING: Donald Trump is elected president of the United States. pic.twitter.com/yJpgfsAbc6

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 9, 2016

Black Mirror deserves a special mention for their Twitter input:

This isn’t an episode. This isn’t marketing. This is reality.

— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) November 9, 2016

The end of the world as we know it?

Election Day has inspired a barrage of apocalyptic mentions (ranging from “end of the world” to “armageddon”.

What a day.

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