The findings were comprehensive: An analysis of tweets from the 2010 midterm elections found the data correctly predicted the winner in 404 of the 406 House races.
“We plotted it and thought, ‘Holy moly, it was a very strong correlation,’ ” said Fabio Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana and one of the study’s coauthors. He added that preliminary analysis of last year’s congressional elections show similar results.
The findings rest on two important points: The raw number of tweets about a candidate doesn’t matter, and neither does whether the tweets are positive or negative. Rojas and his colleagues, who collected hundreds of thousands of tweets from the 2010 race, initially measured the total number of times the candidate was mentioned, but the findings failed to correlate with which candidate won. Well-known candidates, like Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., or candidates from bigger and wealthier districts would inherently receive more attention.
It was then, Rojas said, they realized that what mattered was the Twitter “horse race,” or the number of tweets a candidate earns vis-à-vis his or her opponent. Just as the candidates would compete for a limited percentage of the vote, they would also compete for a limited percentage of the total Twitter traffic.
via Tweets Can Foretell Votes, Study Finds – NationalJournal.com.
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