Location-Based Twitter Sentiment Analysis for Predicting the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election

We seek to determine the effectiveness of using location-based social media to predict the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. To this aim, we create a dataset consisting of approximately 3 million tweets ranging from September 22nd to November 8th related to either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Twenty-one states are chosen, with eleven categorized as swing states, five as Clinton favored and five as Trump favored. We incorporate two metrics in polling voter opinion for election outcomes: tweet volume and positive sentiment. Our data is labeled via a convolutional neural network trained on the sentiment140 dataset. To determine whether Twitter is an indicator of election outcome, we compare our results to the election outcome per state and across the nation. We use two approaches for determining state victories: winner-take-all and shared elector count. Our results show tweet sentiment mirrors the close races in the swing states; however, the differences in distribution of positive sentiment and volume between Clinton and Trump are not significant using our approach. Thus, we conclude neither sentiment nor volume is an accurate predictor of election results using our collection of data and labeling process.