• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, March 3, 2016

In the week leading up to Super Tuesday, activity was tracked on Twitter around hashtags and handles related to presidential hopefuls. The data sets describe changes in emotion and hashtags that show hints of what we saw transpire Tuesday evening.

From Feb. 24 through 29, EngageSciences tracked the activity between top political hashtags. The data showed that only one of those candidates, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, had a top related hashtag, not a campaign slogan.

Unfortunately for #MarcoRubio, his top related hashtag was #DonaldTrump.

Considering the below average showing from Rubio two nights ago, one could postulate from this data that he framed himself in the past few weeks as too much the non-Trump candidate, and didn’t pay enough attention to strengthening his own individuality. He has fallen into Trump’s shadow and is having a hard time getting out from beneath it.

Further, data from Networked Insights shows troubling changes in emotional classifiers around Marco Rubio. Indexed at 100, between Feb. 22 and 29, Rubio had a -237 change in forgiveness and a -79 point variation in success. As we will see, these emotional classifiers do not necessarily represent voter sentiment, but in Rubio’s case, correlations abound.

Trump’s emotional classifiers do not seem to fit anything we saw earlier this week. Despite his resounding successes on Tuesday, Networked Insights saw a 487 point decrease in sympathy and a 241 point increase in disgust around Twitter activity focused on Trump.

Significantly, the emotion of resignation was up 114 points around Donald Trump, mirroring that while some Republicans may be averse to Trump, many have resigned themselves to the Trump nomination.

GOP party leaders, as we have seen in the past few days, won’t go down easily. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is still in the mix. In EngageSciences’ data, #TedCruz was the highest-ranked hashtag among Republican candidates, second only to #BernieSanders.

Both Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have the most active followers, with 4.8 tweets per #BernieSanders contributor and four tweets per #Ted Cruz contributor.

It’s doubtful that Sanders and Cruz tweeters will be able to significantly sway the election at this point in the race, but they’ll try.