Methodology: Polarity Charts
What we measure
Several reputed polls like the NBC News/WSJ Survey, Pew Research Center survey, NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll and the CNN SSRS Poll have reported that the top three issues on voters’ minds in the upcoming elections are the coronavirus pandemic, the economy and race relations. NMDSI’s Elecurator project is collecting and analyzing posts on major social media sites like Twitter and Reddit as well as on online blogs and forums about these three topics.
How we measure
We measure sentiments using VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner). VADER is discussed in detail in: Hutto, C.J. & Gilbert, E.E. (2014). VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text. Eighth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-14). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2014. Given a post, VADER assigns a score between -4 (extremely negative) and +4 (extremely positive) to each word in the post (0 is for neutral words). These scores also take into account the context of the word. For example, the score assigned to the word “helpful” would be different based on whether it appears by itself, as part of the phrase “extremely helpful” or of the phrase “quite helpful”. The sentiment score for a post is based on the scores of its words and is calculated to be between -1 (extremely negative) and +1 (extremely positive) with zero for neutral sentiment. This score is called polarity. More details of these computations and code for the package are available here.
Goals of this analysis
Our main goal is to measure whether the overall sentiments expressed in the posts on the top three issues are positive, negative, or neutral, and how they are changing over time, in each state and the following seven groupings of states:
Strongly Republican: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wyoming
Likely Republican: Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Utah
Leaning Republican: Alaska, Iowa, Montana, Texas
Toss up: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio
Leaning Democrat: Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania Wisconsin
Likely Democrat: Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia
Strongly Democrat: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington
Charts you will see for each of the three topics
1. Daily comparison of the average polarity of all the posts on that day about the topic that also reference Joe Biden with the corresponding average polarity for Donald Trump.
2. Comparison of the average polarity of all the posts about the topic that also reference Joe Biden over the entire period during which we collected the data with the corresponding average polarity for Donald Trump. The chart shows this comparison across the following seven groups of states.
Strongly Republican: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wyoming
Likely Republican: Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Utah
Leaning Republican: Alaska, Iowa, Montana, Texas
Toss up: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio
Leaning Democrat: Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania Wisconsin
Likely Democrat: Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia
Strongly Democrat: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington
3. A blue country map for Joe Biden showing the polarity in each state of the posts by people in that state on the topic that also reference Joe Biden. The letters next to the state’s acronym in each state stand for the following:
STR - Strongly Republican
LIR - Likely Republican
LER - Leaning Republican
TUP - Toss up
LED - Leaning Democrat
LID - Likely Democrat
STD - Strongly Democrat
4. An orange country map for Donald Trump showing the polarity in each state of the posts by people in that state on the topic that also reference Donald Trump. The letters next to the state’s acronym in each state stand for the following:
STR - Strongly Republican
LIR - Likely Republican
LER - Leaning Republican
TUP - Toss up
LED - Leaning Democrat
LID - Likely Democrat
STD - Strongly Democrat