IOWA

With less than a week until the Iowa presidential caucuses, public opinion polls give conflicting reports about which candidates are leading. These polls may be weak predictors compared to Twitter data, which numerically represents a larger segment of the public. Consequently, we were curious how Americans really feel about the candidates.

At the University of South Carolina, our research team analyzed political sentiment on Twitter to project election results. The study looked at 29,434 tweets containing @berniesanders, @hillaryclinton , @realdonaltrump and @tedcruz in Iowa between November 2015 and early January 2016. Results showed that Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders are respectively the most favored Republican and Democratic candidates in the Iowa Twittersphere.

On the GOP side, the analysis found that 47.5% of the tweets mentioning Trump in November were positive. This figure grew to 49.96% in the following month. January tweets showed that the positive amount declined further to 47.3%. Contrary to Trump, Sen. Cruz enjoyed a greater increase in his popularity on Twitter: 7.6% of the tweets mentioning him were positive in November 2015, and this number grew to 60.5% in December. Early results in January showed a further increase to 85.7%.

For Democratic candidates, Clinton started with a higher percentage of favorable tweets than Sanders, but her trend reversed in December. Her popularity decreased from 77.7% to 32%. It bounced back to 47.2% in the subsequent month. In comparison, only 25% of the Sanders related tweets were positive in November. This figure rose to 86.8% in December and dropped to 68.1% in early January.

In sum, Trump was mentioned most frequently with 21,513 relevant tweets through out the whole time period with 50.4% negative tweets in total. Other candidates did not receive the same attention: Clinton had 3,191 tweets, while the amount of tweets mentioning Cruz and Sanders were respectively 2,454 and 2,276. Overall, 82.2% of the tweets mentioning Sanders were positive, making him the most favored Democratic candidate. On the other hand, Cruz with 54% positive tweets is the most favored Republican candidate in Twitter.