The Twitter buzz around the Melissa Harris-Perry show subsided on Sunday, as the uproar over the apology about comments on Mitt Romney’s Christmas card began to fade. A quick look at the word cloud shows that while the apology was still in the mix, other subjects like homelessness were more frequently mentioned:
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Compare that with Saturday’s word cloud
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And you can see the change in topics a day makes.
As the last votes from election 2012 trickle in, people on both sides of the political divide have moved on from their initial reactions to the election towards planning for the future. But the questions of could-have should-have still linger in many people’s minds: could a change in effort or focus have switched the results?
To answer that, it’s good to know how close the election really was. We all know how many votes separate the two candidates, but apart from finding 3.5 million more declared, dedicated Romney voters, what would have changed the outcome? There’s a lot of what-ifs that people will play in their mind, and most are impossible to quantify. But one set of what-ifs are fairly easy to model: what if the demographics of the electorate had changed?
For example, what if the african-american vote had been lower? With enough fewer votes, Romney would have won:
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About 4 million fewer african-american voters, and Romney could have won.
Want to play with the demographics yourself? You can! Just visit my Election Mulligan web page:
http://socialseer.com/apps/mulligan
You can test such things as changing the male/female balance in the votes, adding in more rich voters or removing poor voters, seeing what happens if more latinos vote, or reducing the youth vote. See what it takes to put Romney in the White House (if that’s your goal) or see how really hard it would have been for Romney’s Get-Out-The-Vote efforts to overcome Obama’s impressive campaign (if you like what happened)!
It’s fun, fast, and easy, And you may be surprised how hard it would be to change the election.
The data for this app is based upon election results updated to 11/21 and exit polls conducted at the time of the election. Note that exit polls are subject to error, and the results of this app are purely hypothetical.
With all of the excitement over Todd Akin, it’s easy to forget that last week was all about Romney picking Paul Ryan as his running mate. But it was a busy week nonetheless, and it’s interesting to look at how it was played out on Twitter.
The first thing that stands out is that the number of tweets mentioning each candidate was roughly the same. Both received about 1.9 million mentions on Twitter. Romney may have fewer followers, but he’s just as hot of a topic.
For both of the candidates, about 45% of the tweets were retweets, while the rest were not (or were modified in the process). There’s a lot of people expressing their opinions out there. And what were those opinions?
If you use Twitter, there’s no surprise that last week’s supreme court decision about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is a hot topic. So what’s everyone talking about? I analyzed tweets from 6/28/2012 through the end of 7/3/2012:
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Does this mean that Twitter was almost 2 to 1 (29%:18%) against Obamacare? Not quite — a lot of the humor was directed at anti-ACA folks (mostly, it seems, about them moving to Canada in protest). Still, it’s clear that the anti-ACA tweeple have been more active.
It will be interesting to see if, in a week or so, whether this intensity keeps up …
Notes:
To do this analysis, I did a statistically valid sampling of over 500 tweets from the nearly 500K tweets that contained keywords related to the act and the supreme court ruling. I read each and every one of them (and sometimes followed the links in them to be certain of the intent). I then assigned them to one of the categories you see above (and discarded ones that were not on the topic). This sampling is designed to give each score a +/- 5% interval at 95% confidence.
There are several sources of bias, of course. One is “volunteer bias”, which means that you cannot infer what the typical user of Twitter thinks, only what the typical tweet says. There is also a risk of an analysis bias, in that I’m reading the tweets and assigning them to the categories the best that I can. Sometimes, though, sarcasm and sincerity are hard to tell apart!
When the President said the private sector was doing fine1, it set off a storm of criticism from his political opponents. And that storm spilled onto Twitter as well. These storms come like summer rain here in Florida: the sky clouds over, there’s lightning, thunder, and rain, and then the clouds part and the blue sky returns.
When you look at how two storms washed through Twitter — the #Julia infographic response and the #Doing[Just]Fine comment, we can see how brief these storms are:
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Typically, within a week virtually all the excitement is spent, and within two weeks it has drifted into the background. On that schedule, by June 22nd the Doing Fine remark will be forgotten in favor the next excitement to come along.
Footnote: