Predicting the 2020 US Presidential Election with Twitter
This is an incremental approach for political analysts and campaign strategists seeking to complement traditional polling with social media data.
The paper tackled predicting the 2020 US Presidential Election using Twitter data by proposing a method combining sentiment analysis, structural data, polling, and time series analysis, but it performed worse than baseline polling predictions, with results deemed inconclusive due to data scarcity.
One major sub-domain in the subject of polling public opinion with social media data is electoral prediction. Electoral prediction utilizing social media data potentially would significantly affect campaign strategies, complementing traditional polling methods and providing cheaper polling in real-time. First, this paper explores past successful methods from research for analysis and prediction of the 2020 US Presidential Election using Twitter data. Then, this research proposes a new method for electoral prediction which combines sentiment, from NLP on the text of tweets, and structural data with aggregate polling, a time series analysis, and a special focus on Twitter users critical to the election. Though this method performed worse than its baseline of polling predictions, it is inconclusive whether this is an accurate method for predicting elections due to scarcity of data. More research and more data are needed to accurately measure this method's overall effectiveness.