socialmedian: Election Results According To Twitter

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Source: Mashable!

Nov 04, 2008

Summary

Is there anything Twitter can’t do? Apparently, you can even use it to guesstimate the result of US presidential elections in certain states.

This little chart below, although not graphically beautiful, is the result of some algorithms put together by Setfive Consulting. They’re parsing tweets to see if users have said they’re supported a candidate or voted for one. Deeper red or blue means more Twitter support for a certain party. The chart is updated live every 10 seconds at this address; at the time of this writing, 143 inputs from Twitter have been recorded.

Of course, take all this with a grain of salt; the folks at Setfive Consulting say they’ve hacked this thing together in about two hours. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how accurate it was once the real results start coming in.

*edit: as noted by Anne Helmond in the comments, there’s another, even more extensitve Twitter poll - although it doesn’t take into consideration individual states - here; and there’s a nice visualization for it here.

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Comments (11)

Isaacaggrey,

Nov 04, 2008

As if Texas would ever be a blue state any time soon.

Alan W Silberberg,

Nov 04, 2008

Sounds great, but who knows the truth behind all the twits? If the map is made of twits than people can get just get their friends to tweet and make it change. The only map that counts today, is the one at the end of the day.

Eric Matt,

Nov 04, 2008

Obama has more people following him on twitter than any one else. It would make sense for him to win the twitter poll. Does Mcain even use twitter?

Josh Miller,

Nov 04, 2008

The problem is that internet peoples, especially Twitter users, seem to lean more towards Obama.

Soundstripe,

Nov 04, 2008

@eric_matt this was my thought exactly

Snowboardcast,

Nov 04, 2008

no better or worse than any other (exit) poll

Cdn,

Nov 04, 2008

Maybe one day, voting will be fully twitterized? ;-)

Coachjeff,

Nov 04, 2008

worthless knowledge, but what it does demonstrate is the power of Twitter and its ability to allow the consolidation of data for analysis

Sarahcrisman,

Nov 05, 2008

Oy! Texas has a lot more liberal blood than you might think!

Thelewisshow,

Nov 05, 2008

Twitter is not there yet. I'd rather see something like a soldier voter map than a Twitter map.

Greghollingsworth,

Nov 05, 2008

This reminds me of "Dewey defeats Truman". The US twitter community is significantly left-leaning, which automatically leads to bad polling data. I love twitter, but using it to predict political issues is silly, the majority of the twitter community are almost guaranteed to be democrats or at least left-leaning independents.