Enter
Most races aren’t real competitions, of course. Relatively few
House challengers run robust
campaigns, and voters generally
are unfamiliar with challengers.
Since House re-election rates
have been over 90 percent in 19
of the past 23 elections, you don’t
need polls or tweet counts to predict the overwhelming majority
of race outcomes. In most cases,
all you need to know is incumbency (or the district’s political
bent) and the candidates’ parties
to predict who will win.
Rothenberg reckons that what
“tweet share” can measure is
name recognition, which is something that we tend to assert as
fact without actually quantifying
it in any way. (That said, I think
that simple horse sense still usually wins out when evaluating
name recognition.)
“But other than that,” Rothenberg writes, “the idea that the
content of tweets is irrelevant, and
that it doesn’t matter if the tweets
originate from inside a district or
from people who cannot even vote
in the race, seems to fly in the face
of logic and everything that political scientists believe.”
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
08.25.13
Lots of people who
write tweets about candidates
are writing negative things
about those candidates.
Surely that makes raw ‘tweet
share’ completely useless
as a measurement, right?”
Oh, yeah, that’s an important
reminder: lots of people who write
tweets about candidates are writing negative things about those
candidates. Surely that makes raw
“tweet share” completely useless
as a measurement, right?
But Rojas says that it doesn’t
matter if the message is positive
or negative.
We believe that Twitter and
other social media reflect the
underlying trend in a political
race that goes beyond a district’s fundamental geographic
and demographic composition.
If people must talk about you,
even in negative ways, it is a
signal that a candidate is on
the verge of victory. The attention given to winners creates a
situation in which all publicity
is good publicity.
Well, then, congratulations to
the next Mayor of New
York City, Anthony Weiner!