Red Binder vs. Blue Binder: Hits and Misses of the Second Romney Obama Debate

October 17, 2012 | Comments Off

If you watched last night’s second presidential debate, you probably had a little chuckle or sigh of disappointment when you walked into your office this morning and saw the dusty binders on your shelf. Binders full of women aside, let’s take a look at the highs and lows of the debate.

In this analysis, we focused only on social media verbatims that mentioned either Obama or Romney during the last 24 hours. Verbatims that mentioned both candidates were not included.

First of all, you can see that the most common topics for social media users to focus on included choice, recommending, political issues, anger, and appreciation.

If you look a little further down the list to see which specific issues social media users focused on, you will see family, employment, religion, Libya, schooling, and the military. Apparently the environment and the TransCanada pipeline weren’t attention grabbers for the social media crowd.

You can also see that for the most part, the most common topics mentioned by people talking about Obama were also the most common topics mentioned by people talking about Romney. The only differentiator was that people talking about Obama were more likely to focus on generic emotional (36% vs 26%) and personality (32% vs 16%) topics.

However, the second chart shows that when it comes to opinions about the topic itself, opinions were all over the place.

In the eyes of social media, Romney was the clear winner when it came to employment (52% positive), religion (46% positive), and education (70% positive). Romney conversations were very much focus on very specific issues.

On the other hand, Obama was the clear winner when it came to recommendations (46% positive), appreciation (45% positive), family (19% positive), elections (40% positive), and Binders of Women (65% positive). Again, Obama conversations tended to be less focused on issues, and more focused on a personal evaluation.

Based on the social media buzz of yesterday and this morning, Obama has a very slight lead among social media users. The distinction between Obama’s personal likeability and Romney’s issue based focus puts Obama at 24.5% positive and 30.7% negative while Romney stands at 20% positive and 28.4% negative. With less than a month to go, there is no clear winner as of today nor as a result of the second debate.

If Binders of Women is puzzling to you, do a quick internet search for it. Memes started to spring up during the debate and they still haven’t stopped. I’ve shared my favourite one here!

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