Coming Soon: A Social Media Tool to Predict Elections

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gained 15,000 Twitter followers during Tuesday’s Democratic debate. Her rival Bernie Sanders gained nearly 50,000 followers. But the Twitterverse winner was not on stage. TIME reports that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump gained 60,000 followers with his live tweets during the event.

When it comes to predicting election outcomes, traditional polling and mainstream media coverage remain key. But the rise of social media — along with a new generation of voters who don’t answer their phones or buy newspapers — has given the soothsayers fits. Gallup, which built its reputation on predicting presidential winners, won’t even try in 2016 (after missing badly in 2012).

"It's hard to do a good poll now," says Smith School marketing professor Wendy W. Moe. She says researchers need to integrate traditional methods with new data sources. The problem is cutting through the clutter that fills virtual gathering spots. "The correlation between unadjusted social media data and well-developed offline market research is almost zero," Moe says.

Moe says pollsters can fix the problem by controlling for three human tendencies that shape online conversations. These include the extremity effect (people tend to be more vocal when they have extreme positive or negative opinions); the venue effect (people tend to gather with like-minded thinkers, creating virtual echo chambers); and the topic effect (people often disagree with candidates on individual issues but still favor them overall). "After we control for those factors, what we have left over is a brand measure that tracks closely with well-developed offline surveys," Moe says.

Moe already has shown how the filters can work in consumer marketing. Now she is collaborating with University of Maryland journalism professor Sarah Oates on a social media instrument for deciphering political campaign data. "We’re looking to see how candidates are communicating with voters, and how voters are perceiving the candidates," Moe says. Look for initial results during the 2016 general election season.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST
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