Interlude · Chapter 5 ½

Gone with the Wind,
as told by 4.8 million tweets

Every month since 2011 we measured how far apart the two parties feel — the distance between their average emotional profiles. Plotted, it is the shape of a famous romance: close, the quarrel, a reunion during a catastrophe, separate bedrooms, and a last word. So here it is played as one. Every movement below is the real number.

A romance in five acts · 2011 – 2026 · distance drives the distance

Two households, one Capitol

Press play. The blue figure is the Democratic caucus, the red one the Republican; the gap between them is the measured emotional distance that month. Their faces show whichever emotion separates them most that year — and which side has it.

D R 2011 0.06 emotional distance
They're close. Nothing worth quoting.

The distance is the Euclidean distance between the two parties' mean scores on eleven emotions in that month (Chapter 5, slide 2, gives the yearly line). Faces: the party that scores higher on the year's largest-gap emotion wears that emotion; the other stays composed. When the gap is wide, each side gets a word: the tweet from that party, that month, scoring highest on the emotion in which it most exceeds the other side (retweets and link-only tweets excluded). Two lines are borrowed from the 1939 film because the data earned them; everything else is the tweets.

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