Obama vs Obama

Obama vs Obama, the one person election

In 28 days of collecting Twitter messages that mention either Obama or Romney the total has reached 7,355,532. That is an average of 262,697 messages a day, and that is a million messages every four days. Attention to the election seems to be in full swing. There has never been any question about Obama being the Democratic candidate. And when Santorum dropped out that left only Romney and Ron Paul, the candidate who could not win. The election on Twitter seems to be in full swing. Or this may be only a prelude and the numbers will be even larger when the campaign does go into full swing.

There is one major spike in the figure that traces the number of Twitter messages per day for Obama plus Romney. That spike was May 9 and 10 when Obama announced that he had decided to support equality in marriage. For two days there were 450,000 messages a day. And there are obvious weekend dips.

The messages containing a reference to Obama are captured in three streams. The largest is any message that contains "Obama." That stream averages 172,712 messages per day. The second stream contains barackobama, which is the user name for the Twitter site used by Obama and his campaign. That stream averages 26,359 messages a day. And the most recent is obama2012, the election stream. It is considerably smaller with an average of 6,042 messages a day.

This is the 'one person election' figure. It displays the total number of Twitter messages a day for Obama and Romney. The number of messages mentioning Obama is the darker area and the messages mentioning Romney is the lighter area.

Roughly 80% of the total messages about the candidates are about Obama. There are some modest differences from one day to the next, but the difference between the two candidates seems remarkably stable for this period.

If all of the messages were positive Mr. Obama's re-election would seem to be asssured. But they are not all positive. In research on Twitter messages about the Republican candidates during the race for the nomination there were more negative messages than positive messages. (Mejova, 2012) It is the case that the messages about Obama and Romney contain a heavy dose of criticism.

What is clear is that Mr. Obama is receiving the bulk of attention -- for good or ill. Many people want to express their views of the president, and not nearly as many are interested in expressing their views of Mr. Romney. Mr. Romney appears to be an afterthought in the messaging at this point.

Obama versus Obama is the stream of 205,115 messages a day.

Is there other evidence that might lead one to conclude that this is a one person race? One bit of evidence comes from the Gallup polling asking about the job approval of the president. March 1, 2010 the percentage of Republicans who believed Mr. Obama was doing a good job fell to 10%. It has bounced around between 10% and 15% since then. For over two years anybody but the president has been the sentiment of Republicans en mass. The campaign for the nomination of the Republican party was largely a campaign about who had the best chance of defeating Obama. The victor of the Republican nomination was this anybody but Obama.

A second bit of evidence comes from the Kentucky primaries held on May 22, 2012. Mr. Obama ran in the Democratic primary against no one. Mr. Romney ran in the Kentucky primary against almost no one. The story of the day was Mr. Obama is in real trouble because he received only 60% of the vote in the Democratic primary. (Kulwicki, 5/23/2012) He is certain to be 'in trouble' in Kentucky. He lost Kentucky by a large margin in 2008, and it has not gotten much better. The point to notice, however, is the total votes for the two candidates. Mr. Obama received 119,000 votes in the Democratic primary running against no one. Mr. Romney received 117,000 votes running against almost no one. The enthusiasm for Mr. Romney's candidacy is fewer votes than Mr. Obama received, and the Obama vote was taken as evidence of his being in real trouble. If vote totals are an indication of enthusiasm then there is more enthusiasm in Kentucky for Obama than for Romney.

All the polls show the contest between Obama and Romney is close. (RealClearPolitics, 5/22/2012) The Twitter messaging suggests that what is close is Obama vs Obama or Obama versus anybody but Obama. This may change, of course. But the Twitter messaging provides an insight you do not get from the polls. Political observers have not missed the relatively unusual character of the election so far. But their evidence for claims about Obama and Romney are largely based on from unsystematic to no evidence. The Twitter messaging provides evidence for this interpretation of the race.

References

Kulwicki, Meredith Forrrest (5/23/2012) Arkansas, Kentucky primaries pose challenge for Obama, FOX13Now.com, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Mejova, Yelena (2012) Political Speech in Social Media Streams: YouTube comments and Twitter Posts, in Sentiment Analysis Within and Across Social Media Streams, dissertation in Computer Science, University of Iowa.

RealClearPolitics, General Election: Romney vs. Obama, average for polls 5/9 - 5/22 showed Obama with 45.5% and Romney with 43.5%.