Skip to main content

#SuperTuesday

When I made a sentiment graph for #GE2015, which stands for General Elections 2015 in Singapore, I was surprised to see much more negative sentiment that I expected. I thought that the election would be very tight and the ruling party PAP will face major challenge from opposition parties. Yet, when the results were announced, PAP won the election with 70% vote share!

The moral of the story is that in Singapore Twitter sentiment about politics is not representative of the voting population. I think that many Americans are hoping the same to be true for the USA. Super Tuesday was two days back on 1st March and the participating states included Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado (with caucuses), Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota (with caucuses), Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia. Additionally, Republican caucuses were held in Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#2016).

Well, what do we have here? Trump is all over the wordcloud again. He really killed it this time because his likely contender for the Presidential race, Hillary Clinton, barely shows up in the tweets. Bernie makes an appearance. Even Chris Christie is mentioned more often than Ted Cruz and potentially Rubio.


The sentiment is much more positive than negative so people are not super concerned about Trump winning. This says something.

 
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

#SanBernadino

Update: Check the companion wordcloud for this here Even as I write this, the events are still unfolding in San Bernardino. Two or possibly three gunmen killed 14 innocent people. You can read up more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting.html or here: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-shooting-live-updates-htmlstory.html Anyway, the most trending hashtag is misspelt! It's worth noticing that at this point NRA was quite common. This is because up to this point people were blaming NRA for the tragedy. This has changed since I downloaded the tweets, however! The sentiment for the hashtag is surprisingly neutral. I say surprisingly because now the hastag has become very toxic as the shooters are identified as Muslims. Suddenly there are so many xenophobic comments that I am sure the sentiment would be quite negative now.

George Zimmerman

Today George Zimmarman is trending because he announced that he will auction off the gun he used to kill Treyvon Martin. It's pretty sad. Anyway I decided to use this search term for getting the wordcloud because generally I don't have negative keywords on this blog. I was also curious to know whether people on Twitter will support him or oppose him.  As it's apparent from the sentiment graph, a majority of Twitter users disliked the news. The sentiment is overly negative with only about 10% people saying positive things about it. In the wordcloud, the main discussion topic is "gun" and words around it. This is not surprising because George Zimmarman usually is not trending. So this bunch of tweets are all about the auctioning of the gun. I think a lot of people also were a bit outraged because his name is "trending" on Twitter. But by showing this outrage probably they added to the trending topic! For example, this tweet received a lot of...

#The Bachelor

I had watched a few episodes of The Bachelor over the years. By few I mean 2-3. So I know what the show is all about. Today the hashtag #The Bachelor was trending and I decided to use it for the wordcloud. Right off the bat there were a few things I didn't quite get because I don't watch the show. What is Lace and Ben? Or, rather who are they? Well, you can read up more about them here:  http://www.inquisitr.com/2681778/get-to-know-lace-morris-of-the-bachelor-2016-with-ben-higgins/  According to this article, Lace Morris is the girl everyone on the show is gonna hate from now on. I didn't find anything strange about her though and she comes across as a regular The Bachelor contestant. Take a look: Anyway, here is the wordcloud and the sentiment graph. The sentiment is not as positive as I expected but anyway.