Introducing the Twitter U.S. 2014 election website

Wednesday, 29 October 2014

Citizens, politicians, other government officials and journalists turn to Twitter every day to connect in creative ways that enrich the public discourse. To better help you monitor the top issues and find local candidates on Twitter, our Government and Elections team (@gov) has built a new #Election2014 dashboard, a one-stop shop for insights around this election season.

Introducing the Twitter U.S. 2014 election website

We are also sharing some of this data with news partners (see more on that below) to enable them to build their own compelling visualizations around election-related data. By interacting with election.twitter.com and partner news sites, you can follow the chatter running up to the midterms, see what’s driving the real-time election conversation around issues and candidates, and connect with the candidates directly.

The data you’ll find in the #Election2014 dashboard is pulled from a curated list of relevant hashtags, @usernames and other related keywords. We update it daily around 1 a.m. ET (in other words, it measures the Twitter conversation from midnight to midnight).

There are several other ways to view and explore the #Election2014 website. You can search for insights by state – either by navigating the map or using the search box. If you select a district (or find it using your zip code), we also make it easy for you to follow candidates who are on Twitter for the House race – though the data is all state level. The main content includes:

  • measures of political conversation levels and demographic profiles
  • a listing of top issues
  • a timeline of Tweets about races in that state
  • accounts related to the candidates for governor and Senate

We’ve already observed several themes by exploring this data: the conversation about the Ebola virus ebbs and flows from state to state as local angles emerge; the topic of law enforcement over-indexes in Missouri related to #Ferguson; and President Obama is the principal driver around election talk, even without appearing on any ballots.

We built this site to give you insights into what people are discussing about politics on Twitter. As noted earlier, we are also sharing some of this data with news partners. Publishers currently using Twitter data to visualize the election include (click on each to go to their website):

Stay tuned for other publishers who will launch throughout the week. Remember to vote next Tuesday and follow @Gov for the latest insights throughout the day.