One Wordcloud A Day

Indian state Uttar Pradesh (UP) just concluded their state election. The largest political party in India, BJP, won the election with a massive majority. The new chief minister of the state is Yogi Adityanath, who is not only a seasoned politician but also the head priest of the Gorakhnath temple in UP. There has been a lot of complaining on social media about the choice of the chief minister. I decided to analyze a few thousand tweets in order to figure out the sentiment of the masses on Twitter. The sentiment is overwhelmingly positive! There are two sentiment charts and two wordclouds that were generated one day apart. The first set was generated just after the name of the chief minister was announced and the second was generated earlier today.

On Saturday 3 states -- Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington -- had Democratic primaries. In all the three states Bernie Sanders won by a huge margin over Hillary Clinton. This is quite an achievement because so far Clinton has been winning many delegates. When I checked earlier, the hashtag #HIcaucus was tending so I downloaded tweets that included it. There is no surprise how the wordcloud looks. Also the sentiment is quite positive which indicates that Bernie supporters were using this hashtag. The news media was silent for a long period about this news. Some Bernie supporters claimed that this is because media is biased against Bernie.

The last scheduled (so far) Democratic Party debate took place couple of days back. I read news reports that said that Hillary came under fire in the debate. So I was interested in learning what happened during the debate using Twitter feed. Unfortunately, Twitter didn't discuss anything interesting! Bernie and Hillary got almost equal mentions but no issues came up as important. The only issues that showed up in the top 50 words in the wordcloud were Benghazi and immigration! It looks like people used #feelthebern hashtag often.

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...

Today there were two news about Sarah Palin. First, she endorsed Donald Trump for his Republican presidential bid. Second, her son Track Palin (yes, that's his name...really) was arrested for domestic violence . So I decided to use this opportunity to see which news is getting more traction on Twitter. To my surprise, Twitter doesn't care much about the son's arrest!It was Trump everywhere. However, there were a few tweets mentioning "son", "domestic", "violence", etc. The sentiment overall was highly neutral.

Today's wordcloud is for #DemDebate. It speaks for itself! Note that these are all original tweets, excluding any retweets. Looks like Bernie Sanders is getting some good coverage after all. It's not a surprise that only 3 candidate names show up all the time - Sanders, Clinton, and O'Malley. Among the issues, "healthcare" pops up frequently. The overall sentiment was neutral and positive tweets were not very high in numbers compared to the negative ones. This indicates polarized Twitter users.

Today's hashtag is for the Democrats debate. This was a 3-way debate between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O'Malley in Manchester, New Hampshire. I have no idea who the third guy is. It seems that Twitter didn't care either.   The overall sentiment about the debate was mostly neutral.