The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election is likely to be a war fought largely on the web. Obama's precedent indicates increased candidate reliance on social media. This begs the question:
How powerful is a Facebook Like?
In particular, can Facebook Likes indicate how a candidate is doing in the polls?
I'll be investigating this over the coming months by daily monitoring of the candidates' total number of Likes. I'm using a little Java script on an old laptop to scrub these values nightly through Facebook's API (unless it has technical issues, then doing so manually roughly once per day). I'll be analyzing the data in Mathematica, showing various visualizations of the data. All the code (and data) is available at https://www.github.com/eaott/election. Feel free to check it out for yourself (or just wait for a post to see how things are going).
I have two weeks of data now, which have shown several things. Donald Trump (R) has the most Likes by quite some margin (2.4M Likes, compared to Rand Paul's [R] 2.0M and Mike Huckabee's [R] 1.8M), and has the greatest gains each night (~28,000 Likes as of this morning, compared to Bernie Sander's [I] ~7300 and Ben Carson's [R] ~6600). Trump, Carly Fiorina (R), and Jim Webb (D) seem to alternate in terms of percentage growth overnight (anywhere from 1% to 2%). For the current state of things, see below. More to come in the next couple days.
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