The News in New Media

Early Voters Head To The Polls in Georgia and Texas

Posted on by mvbraze

Midterms are upon us, and early voting has begun. Many states have different rules regarding early voting, but a majority allow voters to vote early anywhere between 45 days to  5 days before election day. South Carolina generally allows voters to cast an absentee in person ballot 30 days before election day.

Voters are showing up to the polls this midterms season. According to a CNN article published on October 25th, over 9.2 million people in 40 states have cast an early ballot. Currently, Florida has the highest number of early voters, closely followed by California and Georgia.

A keyword search for “early voting” was done using Sprinklr. Our search took place over this week, October 23rd to the 28th. The top themes of discussion surrounding the term “early voting” included Georgia, and Texas both of which have begun their early voting periods this month. Overall, this term was mentioned 339k times and reached 3 billion users in this one-week period. Users were primarily females in the United States, with the largest density of users being in Texas.

Top influencers in the “early voting” keyword search were news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, but also politicians such as, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O’Rourke, and Hilary Clinton.

To investigate the aforementioned top themes a little closer, we are going to take a look at two states making waves in the sense of early voting, Georgia and Texas. Using Sprinklr we searched “Georgia Early Voting” and “Texas Early Voting”, respectively for these searches.

The race for government between Stacey Abrams (D) Brian Kemp (R) is being watched closely by the whole country since the state turned blue in 2020. As of right now FiveThirtyEight has Kemp leading by 6 points. However, we must mention that Stacey Abrams has been credited with the increase in voters in Georgia, especially in the 2020 election year, and it seems this cycle is no different as Georgia is seeing record numbers of early voters.

Georgia also has been in the front of the news cycle for its senate race between Herschel Walker (R) and Raphael Warnock (D). FiveThirtyEight currently has Warnock ahead by 1 point. To see who is talking about these races were went to Sprinklr to analyze conversations surrounding early voting. Our keyword search revealed that the term “Georgia Early Voting” was mentioned 30K times and reached over 242 million users. Demographically, users were females with the most users being from California or Georgia.

The next keyword search showed that the term “Texas Early Voting” was mentioned over 64K times and reached over 490 million users. This term saw an increase in more than double its mentions, from 12,000 to 30,000 on October 24th – this being the first day early voting began in the state. The demographics of users discussing early voting in this state were females in Texas. Conversations mainly focused on the race between Beto O’Rourke (D) and Greg Abbott (R).

Overall, content posted in each of these searches was similar. Most of it being voters showing their pride in showing up to the polls and politicians urging their constituents to engage in democracy. The following are examples of both gubernatorial candidates in Texas.

The Social Media Listening Center will continue to monitor elections through the rest of the midterm season.

Author: Michelle Brazeau

Posted in Tracking News via Social Media Analytics