Can Twitter Predict the Election?

In this presidential election voters have taken to social media like never before. Is it possible then to try and analyse social media engagement to predict the winner of tomorrow's election?


The Twitter Political Engagement Map is a real-time guide to the current political temperature, state by state. The map shows Tweets from @BarackObama and @MittRomney organized by engagement on Twitter.

The Tweets from each candidate are represented by a bar and the size indicates engagement on that Tweet. If you select a Tweet's bar you can view a heat map of engagement state by state on the accompanying map.


Whilst Twitter's own map shows how people are responding to the candidate's own Tweets the Obama vs Romney Tweet Battle shows how many people are Tweeting "Obama" or "Romney".

The map includes a real-time count of Tweets mentioning each candidate. It is also possible to view a heat map showing where each candidate is being Tweeted about the most.


The Bing Elections Center has taken another approach to analysing social media political messages. Their social media analysis attempts to actually gauge the positive and negative feelings about each candidate in social media posts.

Bing have asked a number of questions, such as 'How do people feel about the candidates?', and analysed Tweets to gauge the current mood of the electorate.