Election Buzz: Week Four of the Ontario Campaign on Twitter
Tim Hudak's Million Jobs message ran into a reality check this week, with several economists questioning the math underlying the plan, with the most critical assessments saying that Hudak's plan multiplies each potential job created eight times. Earlier in the week, Hudak's decision to skip the Northern debate didn't win him any points with the Tweeterati. Sentiment towards the Conservatives remains overwhelmingly negative (with 61% of mentions negative to 6% positive, with 33% neutral).
Discussions around the Liberals, meanwhile, have been focussed on Kathleen Wynne's promise to go from a deficit of $12.5 to fiscal balance in three years, despite also promising not to cut public service jobs or alter the terms of the collective bargaining agreements with the public sector unions. Efforts to play up the MaRS real estate bailout as a costly Liberal boondoggle potentially worse than the $1.1 billion gas-plants scandal gained some traction among Conservative supporters. With increased attention, mentions of the Liberal campaign are increasingly negative (52% negative compared to 10% positive and 38% neutral).
Mentions of the NDP turned largely on Horwath's showing at the Northern debate. Other mentions pointed to criticism that Horwath's election platform represents a rightward shift for the party. Mentions of the NDP remain balanced between positive (24%) and negative (21%) comments, though the majority (55%) are neutral.
On average Canadians engage on Twitter 1.49 times when discussing a public issue (average taken from Ipsos studies conducted throughout 2013-14) however, engagement around all three parties during week three of the Ontario campaign is considerably higher (2.98 for the NDP, 2.91 for the Liberals and 2.28 for the Conservatives) which means Ontarians are engaging in the election more deeply (with more back and forth discussion) than they have on past public issues.
While Twitter use and online discussions of public policy and political issues skew heavily toward younger and higher educated Canadians, most Ontarians (57%) say they've engaged on politics and policy issues online in the past month. Those who are actively engaged in political conversations online are much more likely to say they're following the election than those who aren't engaged in politics online (53% compared to 32%).
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos Reid Twitter Analysis conducted between May 24 to 30, 2014. For this analysis a boolean search query was created to identify all English language Twitter discussions from people in Ontario that contained mentions of the Ontario NDP, Liberals, and Conservatives, and all mentions of the party leaders. Each party and leader were put in a separate search query so they could be compared. Official party Twitter accounts and some terms often associated with the federal parties were excluded. All Tweets were pulled from Sysomos between May 24 and May 30. The scan pulled in 44,622 Tweets between those dates. Of those, we pulled a random sample of 300 Tweets per party and coded them for sentiment.
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