In case you’re not already sick of the election cycle, Twitter has launched the Political Index, a new election tracker which measures a candidate’s performance based on what every regular citizen is saying about them in 140-character form.
It takes every tweet that mentions Obama or Romney and decides whether they’re positive or negative, then compares that feeling with all other tweets. Then they get a score—for July 31, the president is at 34, meaning posts about him were more positive than 34 percent of all tweets. Romney was trailing behind at 25. Scores are updated each night. However it doesn’t clarify which way things like “free health care” and “taking out Osama Bin Laden” or “dressage” “owning a couple of Cadillacs” are construed.
That said, Twitter thinks it’s a pretty accurate way to gauge the overall election sentiment, pointing out that the Political Index’s scores has often been pretty similar to Gallup approval ratings for the commander-in-chief. However, Twitter is not necessarily the best sampling of America. We’ll see whether people vote with their tweets in November. Oh god, that’s a long time. [Twitter]
