Who will win the 2016 US Republican and Democrat Presidential Nominations?
For the time period 11/1/2015 – 11/30/2015, my team of researchers at NYU Stern collected Twitter data on the following candidates:
- Marco Rubio
- Ted Cruz
- Donald Trump
- Ben Carson
- Jeb Bush
- Carly Fiorina
- Bernie Sanders
- Martin O’Malley
- Hillary Clinton
We designed a prediction algorithm using these five metrics:
- Mentions
- Tweets (published by Candidate)
- Retweets
- Favorites
- Followers
The heat map represents the ordinal ranking produced by the algorithm.
Grouping the candidates by party, and comparing the results to actual poll rankings we see the algorithm matches the ordinal representation of the Democrat Candidates and has Ted Cruz as second among the Republicans, behind Donald Trump.
While the Ted Cruz point is not consistent with current polls, we believe Twitter to be a directional leading indicator and predict Ted Cruz to break away from the other Republican candidates in the coming weeks. This visualization, based on the algorithm, shows Ted Cruz gradually pulling away from Ben Carson and Marco Rubio.
Interestingly, we find a relationship between Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton, such that when the difference between their scores decreases, Rubio surpasses Clinton in direct comparison polls.
Taken together, we predict the 2016 Democrat Presidential Nominee to be:
- Hillary Clinton
We predict the 2016 Republican Presidential Nominee to be:
- Ted Cruz
If not,
- Donald Trump
Based on his ranking according to the algorithm in addition to his standing in direct comparison polls with Clinton, we believe the 2016 Republican Vice Presidential Nominee to be:
- Marco Rubio
For more details about the study, please email ash487@stern.nyu.edu
Special thanks to Troy Manos, Tarang Dawer, and Keita Shimizu.