Search Tweets

You can use the Midterm Monitor’s Social Data Search to narrow down on accounts and Tweet types by key phrases or terms within our Twitter database. Tweets have been translated from their original language to English; the original text may be viewed by clicking the relevant tweet to show additional information. In some cases, search results here may yield slightly different results than how key phrases are summarized on the dashboard because of (1) how terms are processed by our algorithm; (2) the inclusion of usernames, and other text fields in this tool’s searchable text; and (3) different data update schedules. Generally, these differences should be minor. In some cases, external links may not work because a tweet or an account has been removed.

Search Guidance

Caveats

• Punctuation marks and most common symbols except those specified in the Boolean, Fuzzy and Advanced search instructions are not supported and will return a blank search or be ignored. For example, if you search: “first-time #voter”, the search will interpret it as “first time voter”.
• Except for Booleans (AND, OR, NOT) searches are not case sensitive.

Tips & Tricks

• Use “” to search a specific phrase. For example, if you search: “Georgia election”, the results will show the exact match for Georgia election with both words back-to-back.
• A single account may be searched by prepending ‘tweeterScreenName:’ to the account handle. For example, simply searching ‘tweeterScreenName: thehill’ will return all tweets by ‘@TheHill’.
• Use an * to search for words with the same stem. For example, if you search: elect*, the results will capture words that start with “elect”, such as electricity, elector, and election. This can also be used for infix searches. (e.g., ‘vo*r will match ‘volunteer’ and ‘voter’). See the advanced section for prefix searches.

Boolean Searches

• Use a + or AND as a Boolean AND. For example, if you search: voter AND turnout, the results will show both “voter” and “turnout” in them — in any part of the text.
• Use OR as a Boolean OR. For example, if you search: voter OR turnout, the results will show you either “voter” or “turnout” or both.
• Use –, !, or NOT as a Boolean NOT. For example, if you search: vote – Emmys, the results will show you “vote” but without the term “Emmys”.

Fuzzy Searches

• Use ~ for a fuzzy search.  For example, if you search: hill~, the results will show “bill”, “hill”, and “hills”. A number may be appended to your search (e.g., hill~1) to limit the number of characters that can be changed.
• Use ~ and a number in combination with “” to perform a proximity search. For example, if you search: “voter turnout” ~5, the results will return ‘voter’ and ‘turnout’, where each word is within 5 words of each other.

Advanced

• There is limited support for regular expressions. For example, if you search:  /[mh]otel/, the results will return matching ‘Hotel’ or ‘Motel’.
• Use the format “/.*/” to do prefix wildcard searches. For example, if you search:  /.*election/, the results will match ‘election’, ‘reelection’, and ‘selection’.