President Trump gave his first State of the Union Tuesday night, a closely watched and deeply scrutinized address for any administration.

Zignal Labs took a deep dive into the media and social conversations as they happened around the SOTU. Here were some key takeaways, as captured through real-time sampling by our analytics platform.

Overall, politicians were…political

As we looked at the difference between congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans, the reactions were essentially exactly what you’d expect: split firmly down party lines. Just look at the positioning between Republicans and Democrats around taxes.

Here’s the word cloud we generated just looking at congressional GOP tweets.

And here’s the version created by examining only congressional Democrats’ social feedback.

The contrast is incredibly clear, even when we do just a quick visual scan to see the biggest and most used terms (Republicans’ position of “#taxreform” versus Democrats’ “#goptaxscam”). Interestingly, the subject seemed to fire up the Democrats much more – we see more use of highly emotive language (e.g., #trumpsellsout, #sotuclapback, #thingstrumpwonttalkabout). Republicans are content to stay “little-c” conservative with their rhetoric here, with sober word choices like #jobs, #taxcutsandjobsact, and #manufacturing.

Below, this quick time-lapse of #taxreform versus #goptaxscam illustrates non-politician reactions on the same topic.

And the people were not just watching but judging

With about 4.5 million tweets around the State of the Union and its associated subjects, there was inevitably going to be a partisan head-to-head. The matchup coalesced around #maga and #theresistance. As the speech went on, President Trump’s supporters, the #maga crew, handily beat #theresistance by a factor of three as measured by volume of tweets.

Emojis helped illustrate the differences between the administration’s supporters and detractors

As I’ve written about before, emojis are more than merely adornment to social commentary but are useful contextual clues that refine and clarify meaning. As we looked at #maga versus #theresistance, that proved true once more.

For #maga, the American flag took central stage, with other similarly all-American emojis popping up as well (such as the train, pizza, beer, trophy).

In contrast, the #resistance emoji group displayed wider array of emojis being used fairly equally. For example, the resistance fist and the American flag were similarly sized. Other emojis seemed to reflect more typically liberal priorities: the environment, as typified by the recycling symbol and the ocean wave, for example.

Did you watch the SOTU? What’d you think?