"We did not find a similar pattern in Barack Obama's recent followers. "
Why would you expect the patterns to be remotely similar? Obama has been the President for over 3 years. Romney has been a presidential candidate for a few months.
"Our test is based on the underlying assumption that the followers of Twitter accounts tend to display a some kind of general indegree distribution."
Unwarranted assumption. It could be that many new people are joining Twitter JUST to follow the Romney campaign.
"Selected the twenty accounts closest in size to both Romney and Obama,"
I'm not sure why anyone would consider this a valid sampling technique.
"The median number of followers for Romney's new followers was 5, whereas the median for the comparison group was 27. This represents a stark, and statistically significant difference. If you are a statistics nerd, like us, you might want to know that the p-value on this was 0.0000. "
Not if the "comparison group" is completely bogus.
