One glance at the numbers, and it’s easy to see why pundits are already calling 2012 “the Twitter election.” More Tweets are sent every two days today than had ever been sent prior to Election Day 2008 — and Election Day 2008’s Tweet volume represents only about six minutes of Tweets today.
All this explosive growth in conversation has fueled Twitter as a platform for civic debate and created a massive data set for analysis.
Today, we’re launching the Twitter Political Index, a daily measurement of Twitter users’ feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week.
Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics.
The trend in Twitter Political Index scores for President Obama over the last two years often parallel his approval ratings from Gallup, frequently even hinting at where the poll numbers are headed.
More on this: Twitter Blog – A new barometer for the election
