Without Trump, Hillary Clinton would have been the #1 story of the year — driven largely by conservative Twitter users and Beltway elites. Bernie Sanders would have led the conversation amongst liberals. This reminds us that simply because someone is often mentioned on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that the conversation is positive. In last year’s Year in News, we found that political opponents were the most likely to mention a political leader on Twitter. We believe that the best way to solve for the vexing problem of sentiment analysis in politics is to measure conversation levels amongst natural groups of supporters and opponents, as we do in Optimized Listening.

Looking at this weekly breakdown also underscores just how little different groups agree on what the agenda should be, never mind the right way to think about an issue. On just two weeks of the fifty so far this year have all groups — the general U.S. Twitter population, the media, liberals, and conservatives — agreed on the #1 story: the week of Ted Cruz’s announcement and the Pope’s visit. (Without Trump, it’s three.) Very often, we see how one event sparks a follow-up conversation, or a series of follow-up conversations that differ across groups. We saw this with the Charleston shooting and the Confederate Flag, and also with the Paris attacks: liberals and the media emphasized the issue of refugees before talking about ISIS, while conservatives pivoted directly to ISIS.

All of this analysis is made possible through Optimized Listening, which identifies who’s driving the conversation across more than 100 political, policy, and business issues in real time. By crossing social conversation with cluster analysis of key audiences on Twitter, we automate the process of discovering the underlying political and policy dynamics that are shaping opinion, making social data truly actionable.