The First Debate of the Twitter Election

Most key elections have a key medium, and whoever wins this year’s frantic Presidential contest will owe that success partly to Twitter.PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN LOCHER / AP

The first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton officially started a few minutes after 9 P.M. last night, but on Twitter the festivities began hours—or was it months?—earlier. As the platform of choice for pile-ons of partisans, defiant nonpartisans, and self-appointed referees, Twitter emerged early as the ring in which the debate narrative would be wrestled out and judged. It isn’t just that the service has become Trump’s favorite bully pulpit, or a leading sloganeering platform for Clinton’s supporters. It’s that the form of a tweet—short, fast, and easily passed on—is suited to a campaign season in which gaffes occur several times daily and health updates are released with a glow of drama befitting “General Hospital.” Even with Twitter’s future uncertain, its role in this campaign is settled and firm. Most key elections have a key medium (radio for the silver-tongued F.D.R., TV for the dashing Kennedy). Whoever wins the frantic, news-bite-addled contest of 2016 will owe that success partly to the small blue bird.

I happen to have watched last night’s debate, the most tweeted ever, in the most digital-era way possible: on a laptop, alone, and in an unlikely location, having stolen out of a midtown dinner event early and torn down Sixth Avenue in pursuit of a venue with Wi-Fi. Twitter began weighing in before a single candidate had opened his or her mouth. When Clinton started speaking, tweeters immediately focussed their attention on her opponent, setting up a pattern of lopsided intrigue for the night. “Why is Trump squinting?” somebody asked. The sentiment echoed across what’s known, misleadingly, as the Twittersphere. Twitter, like most social-media services, is an instrument of selective scope; the “sphere” you follow isn’t comprehensive of the globe but of a narrow range of users you find interesting. For me, these people were disproportionately journalists and other members of the broad media church. My Twitter view of the debate, accordingly, skewed heavily toward irony, fact-checking, and a general incredulous air.

That sensibility more or less aligned with the mood of Clinton, whose efforts had the patient pertinacity of someone trying to make a case for something reasonable at the D.M.V. She counselled; he cut in; he lectured; she laughed. Visually—which is to say, with the old-school eye of television—it seemed clear who was at an advantage. Clinton, wearing a trim red suit and an immutable coif, seemed sanguine and entertained to a point approaching condescension. (Some on Twitter wondered why she smiled so much; they were pummelled with the pebbles of three thousand slings.) Trump, meanwhile, spent the debate looking harried, his stiff blue tie drifting pendulously outside his jacket, his shoulders hunched, his top-hair seeming wider and flatter than usual, like the unfortunate first pancake of a batch. It wasn’t exactly Kennedy and Nixon, but it was clear which candidate you’d want to take you to the fair.

What about Twitterally, though? Who led online? According to NBC’s tweeted analysis, Trump, by somewhat mysterious metrics, generated sixty-two per cent of the “Twitter conversation,” while Clinton generated thirty-eight. On Twitter, though, it isn’t clear that more mentions translate into more success. The online tropes that stuck to Clinton were, on the whole, positive, while the moments associated with Trump had a distinctly negative cast. Clinton was not immune to Twitter scrutiny and criticism—the conservative outlet Breitbart challenged her statements throughout the debate, and other commentators raised episodes from her political past—but Trump’s insults and perversions of fact travelled farther, making the Twitter tropes attached to his name increasingly unflattering as the evening progressed.

Consider Clinton’s widely tweeted lines. “I prepared to be President” was popular; so was “Words matter,” which got blasted around in graphic-quote form. Three kinds of videos of Clinton were circulated in the moments following the debate: clips of her being interrupted; clips of her amused, patient, and calm expression; and clips of her whoop and shimmy when presented with an opportunity to answer Trump’s claims. Compare these points with Trump’s most successful Twitter bites. There was his speculative attribution of the Democratic National Committee hacks to a guy who “weighs four hundred pounds,” which earned a collective “Huh?” There was his unfortunate description of Barack Obama as “Your President,” a startling enough remark to be called out by “Good Morning America,” not exactly a bastion of political cynicism. Avid real-time fact-checking of Trump’s claims was rampant, and the results weren’t great. What’s more, the candidate had something weird going on with his nose (Howard Dean wondered whether he was a cocaine user), and Twitter feeds filled up with supercuts of him sniffing at the microphone. In the late stages of the debate, which found Trump giving rambling answers seeded with pop-cultural name-dropping, “Rosie O’Donnell” began trending on Twitter.

As the debate drew to a close, Twitter took stock. There was quizzical interest in Alicia Machado, the Miss Universe winner whom Trump allegedly called “Miss Piggy” and whose name Clinton introduced (followed by the release, on Twitter, of a mini documentary); Machado’s own tweet about her citizenship was widely cited. It was noted, awkwardly, that one of Trump’s post-debate remarks, about wanting to discuss Monica Lewinsky but holding back, had originated with a Real Housewife. Judgments started to be cast. If Twitter users’ conduct at this debate set a standard for the next two, not all is lost, and some things may even be gained. Users of the medium were attentive, demanding, and sometimes more factually rigorous than the candidates themselves. But it was also, unmistakably, Twitter, the home of quick responses and at times baffling themes. (The hashtag #TrumpWon is trending today, in part because it seems to be in use by both true believers and hordes of satirists.) Before everybody went to sleep, a novelist summed up the evening, on the floor and online, with a GIF of impeccable social-media credentials: a funny, winsome video of a cat fighting a dog.

Read more about the first debate: John Cassidy on Donald Trump’s self-inflicted errors, Amy Davidson on how Trump failed to bully Clinton, Benjamin Wallace-Wells on how Clinton turned Trump into Mitt Romney, and Jill Lepore on the fate of the debate.