Horses and Bayonets Line Wins Twitter During Third Presidential Debate

Last night’s third and final Presidential debate set out to focus on foreign policy, and despite a few detours into domestic policy, moderator Bob Schieffer managed to keep President Obama and M...
Horses and Bayonets Line Wins Twitter During Third Presidential Debate
Written by Josh Wolford
  • Last night’s third and final Presidential debate set out to focus on foreign policy, and despite a few detours into domestic policy, moderator Bob Schieffer managed to keep President Obama and Mitt Romney on that track.

    This morning, Twitter has once again unveiled their statistics from the debate (which they’ve done for every previous contests). According to a blog post, Twitter users sent out 6.5 million tweets regarding the debate during its 90-minute duration. That’s just shy of what we saw at last week’s town hall-style debate, which generated 7.2 million tweets. But neither of them compare in sheer tweet volume to what we saw during the first Presidential debate – over 10 million total tweets.

    All of the Presidential debates generated more buzz than the Vice Presidential debate, which saw 3.5 million tweets.

    Twitter also looks at which moments from the debate that generated instant buzz in the form of tweets per minute across the network. And last night, President Obama’s “horses and bayonets” line took the crown with 105,767 TPM.

    The next top moment of the night came when Bob Schieffer said “I think we all love teachers.” That saw 102,339 TPM. Finally, Romney’s comments on Obama’s “apology tour” came in third with 87,040 TPM.

    President Obama’s “horses and bayonets” comment came in response to a Romney assertion that we now how fewer ships in the U.S. Navy than we did nearly 100 years ago. Here’s the quote of the night, according to Twitter buzz:

    And as you would expect, a parody Twitter account popped up almost immediately. It currently sports over 34,000 followers.

    Twitter also says that the topic of conversation in the Twittersphere stuck to foreign policy, for the most part (54%). The economy placed second, with 20% of the conversation. Terrorism took 9% of the chatter and taxes 7%. Finally, Twitter users spent 4% of their debate tweets discussing energy and the environment.

    If you happened to miss last night’s debate, you can watch it in its entirety below:

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