University of South Carolina

In democracies around the world, researchers have used multiple methods to monitor elections using social media. Our research team is analyzing support on Twitter for the 2016 presidential candidates. Our approach defines candidate support number of positive and negative tweets. By supplementing preexisting techniques, the team is able to say which candidates Twitter users regard more favorably. These results are promising for politicians and researchers alike hoping to influence and understand public opinion sentiment.

This time we shifted our attention to South Carolina (SC) as a largely a “red state”. Our team would like to know about the USC family opinion about the primary candidates and Twitter was the best option for this purpose. An analysis of more than 40,000 Twitter accounts of UofSC followers with more than around 1,400,000 tweets shows that less than 1% (0.65%) of tweets was related to the primary candidates in the US 2016 presidential election. It is worth to mention that we collected the last 100 tweets of each accounts. In addition, most tweets (54%) were neutral and we focused on positive and negative tweets (46%).

In aggregate terms, Trump was mentioned most frequently with 1,748 tweets, 66.3% of which were positive. Sanders received the second most tweets (678) followed by Clinton (623), Rubio (505), Cruz (467), Bush (251), and Kasich (51).

Attention, however, is not always a good thing. Regarding the overall tone of tweets, Rubio (74.26%) and Bush (69.32%) earned mostly positive tweets, while Cruz elicited 34.9% negative tweets among the candidates with more than 200 tweets. On the Democrat side, Sanders’ (69.17%) was more positive than Clinton’s (64.21%).

These findings offer a glimpse of the insight that our team’s techniques can produce. While it is too early to say whether these techniques can predict elections, it is clear they can help. Since President Obama pioneered social media politicking in 2008, the strategy has become increasingly prevalent. These techniques thus offer a way to clarify the complex web of politics.