We must confess we were a bit wary of extending social media-based prediction into to the minds of Iowans gathering in caucus halls around their state to select their favourite candidate for presidential candidate. Iowan politics is famously local: our measurements are global.
As it turns out we were fairly good at picking out what matters. The results gave Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum more or less equal votes, with others – Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman trailing far behind.
Our measurements of social media in the last few days showed that the three most talked about candidates were Santorum, Romney and Paul. The six most mentioned candidates received about the same amount of appreciation. But comparing the amount of appreciation with the amount of aversive sentiment they generate we find that Romney had the best differential, and that Gingrich and Bachmann show strongly negative differential.
We will not quite as shy in four years’ time!
