New Hampshire

With less than a week until the New Hampshire (NH) presidential caucuses, public opinion polls give reports about which candidates are leading. These polls may be weak predictors compared to Twitter data, with more than 51 million US users that most of them are between 18 and 49 years old [1], which numerically represent a larger segment of the public. It is worth to mention that Consequently, we were curious how Americans really feel about the candidates. After the Iowa caucuses, the presidential candidates on both sides shifted their focus to the NH Primary. Public opinion polls show results with narrow margins, making Twitter data an inspiring way to look at the popularity of candidates. It helped us to gain valuable insight before the Iowa caucuses, and we continue to monitor people’s affinity with each major candidate in the Twittersphere of New Hampshire.

At the University of South Carolina, our research team analyzed political sentiment on Twitter to project election results. The study looked at 235,508 tweets containing @berniesanders, @hillaryclinton , @marcorubio, @realdonaltrump and @tedcruz in NH between November 2015 and mid January 2016. Results showed that Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders are respectively the most recent favored Republican and Democratic candidates in the NH Twittersphere.

On the GOP side, the analysis found that 68.6% of the tweets mentioning Trump in November were positive. This figure grew to 91.1% in the following month. January tweets showed that the positive amount declined further to 51.7%. Contrary to Trump, Rubio enjoyed a greater increase in his popularity on Twitter: 55.8% of the tweets mentioning him were positive in November 2015, and this number grew to 71.1% in December. Early results in January showed a further increase to 73%. Cruz had similar pattern as the same as Trump to grew from 64% in November to 65.7% in December and to decline further to 57.7% in January.

For Democratic candidates, Clinton started with a higher percentage of favorable tweets than Sanders in November and December, but her trend reversed in January. Her popularity decreased from 81.8% to 58.5%. In comparison, 49.7% of the Sanders related tweets were positive in November. This figure rose to 70.35% in December and 71.6% in early January.

In sum, Trump was mentioned most frequently with 107,647 relevant tweets through out the whole time period with 79.7% positive tweets in total. Other candidates did not receive the same attention: Clinton had 4,275 tweets, while the amount of tweets mentioning Sanders, Cruz and Rubio were respectively 3,357, 1,524 and 951. Overall, 73.3% of the tweets mentioning Clinton were positive, making her the most favored Democratic candidate compare to Sanders with 57% positive tweets. On the other hand, Rubio and Cruz with 64.6% and 61.7% positive tweets are the second and the third Republican candidate in Twitter.