Four years ago I looked at local and national candidates’ Facebook and Twitter followings and how they corresponded to their election results.  Then, the candidate’s Facebook followings predicted the winner in 8 of 9 races I looked at.  In 2018, Facebook followings only predicted the winner in 5 out of the 9 races I looked […]

Joe Biden had an impressive win in South Carolina yesterday.  The real test for the seven remaining candidates is Super Tuesday in two days with 14 states and two territories voting.  This gives a total of 1,242 pledged delegates at stake or 32% of the total pledged delegates.  I thought I would take a look […]

With the primary season heating up I thought I would give an update to the state of the twitter and Facebook primaries for the presidential candidates.  Above is a scatter plot showing the Twitter Followings of the candidates as of Wednesday, Jan 8 on the x axis and the January Real Clear Politics national poll […]

In a follow up to my posts on social media and the upcoming elections I came across this interview on Democracy Now! with Roger McNamee.  He is an early mentor and investor of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.  He now says the company is a threat to US Democracy.  In the clip below he talks about […]

I have been away for a while being swamped with teaching and working.  I finally have time to put a post together.  I though I would follow up my post on the 2020 Facebook Primary by looking at changes in the Twitter followings of the candidates and their poll averages.   I looked at their twitter […]

Four years ago I showed that a candidate’s following on Facebook predicted their support in the polls at this point four years ago.  It predicted 70.6% of the variability for Republicans and 75.6% of it for Democrats.  I thought I would lake a look at how the candidates fare with Facebook and Twitter in the Democratic […]

My social media experiment did not work.  Of the nine local and statewide races I followed, only 5 winners had the greater social media presence (see table below).  In 2016 Facebook followings predicted the winner in 8 of the 9 races.  Does that mean that Russia does not care about our elections any more or […]

  On September 29, at the Homecoming parade for Shaler High School I met Lyndsey Williams who is running for the PA State Senate post for district 38.  This is a district once held by Jim Ferlo who was an outspoken advocate for single payer/medicare for all for decades.  In 2014 his district was redrawn […]

I have taken the plunge and bought a Domain name for this blog,  https://alleghenyindependent.media/.  For the time being I will stay with blogger to see how it influences the traffic I get. I will focus my first post on the upcoming 2018 election looking at the candidate’s social media followings.  In the 2016 election I […]

It has been a turbulent year for me with moving and other responsibilities.  Since my last anniversary post I have written 27 posts here compared to 41 posts the year before, a 52% decrease.  The decrease in posts is reflected in a 19% decrease in traffic.  This discrepancy in the traffic and the posts suggests […]