Election Buzz: Week One of the Ontario Campaign on Twitter

Toronto, ON - With the writ officially dropped and the election campaign underway, a new Ipsos Reid analysis of the Week One Twitter discussion conducted on behalf of CTV News and CP24 shows that the Parties struggling to get their message out via Twitter. Overall the need for JOB CREATION dominated the issue agenda on Twitter but none of the Parties seem to capitalize on this.

Twitter sentiment around the parties was most negative for the PCs (58% negative, 18% positive and 25% neutral). However, the Liberals fared only slightly better (43% negative, 15% positive and 42% neutral) although not nearly as polarizing as the Conservatives. The NDP meanwhile received much more balanced commentary (24% negative, 20% positive and 56% neutral) albeit with less volume.

By calling the election rather than waiting for their Budget to be rejected the Liberals dominated Twitter early in the campaign but most of the early commentary focused on past Liberal scandals and a poor record for managing the economy and creating jobs. By Day 3 of the Campaign the discussion leveled off and by Day 8 Conservative announcements of 100,000 public sector cuts and a one million job creation plan dominated with the majority of the commentary being negative.

Typical comments questioned how job cuts were compatible with the goal of creating a million jobs. "This seems counterproductive to his overall goal," one person Tweeted. Another described a "million-job fantasy tour" that would "tank" the economy by "firing 100,000 people." Other comments pointed to the effort to brand Hudak as "Harris 2.0" by pointing out that, "With Harris, Ontario balanced (the budget) and added 900 000 jobs, and (the average wage) rose $2/hour."

One interesting development from the Twitter analysis is the level of engagement around all the Parties. 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 one of the Ontario campaign is considerably higher (2.42 for the NDP, 2.33 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.

Twitter use and online discussions of public policy and political issues skew heavily toward younger and higher educated Canadians so it remains to be seen how the social media debate will play out come election day but one thing is for sure - with 37% of Ontarians talking politics and policy online there is a discussion taking place that the political parties may want to listen to.

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These are some of the findings of an Ipsos Reid Twitter Analysis conducted between May 2 to 9, 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 ON 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 2 and May 9. The scan pulled in 45,745 Tweets between those dates. Of those, we pulled a random sample of 300 Tweets per party and coded them for sentiment and content.

For more information on this news release, please contact:

Mike Colledge
President
Ipsos Reid
Public Affairs
613.688.8971
[email protected]

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