The American election is a worldwide fanfare that gets most of everyone on the planet earth glued to their screens. From the explosive businessman Donald Trump, the “unqualified” Ted Cruz (Donald’s words not mine), the mild-mannered, soft-spoken retired neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson, the “dinosaur” Bernie Sanders and the somewhat people’s favourite Hillary Clinton, it’s just too fun to watch.
As much as technology has done to bring them closer to us, you, and I, know we need more. Guess what??! They are giving us more!!
Two of the giants in technology @GoogleTrends and @Twitter have teamed up with News Corporation Associated Press to create a tool called AP’s Election Buzz which shows what’s hot in #Election2016. This is planned as a way to show us how the American electorate is thinking during this run up to the Republican and Democratic conventions due to be held in Cleveland from the 18th to the 21st of July and in Philadelphia from the 25th to the 28th of July respectively which in turn lead to the national elections due to be held on November 8th 2016 to replace two-term President Barack Obama.
This tool allows you to see what people have been talking about on Twitter with regard to the election. The good thing is whether you are a veteran in political issues or not, it’s easy to understand and with a time frame that stretches back to August 2015 it allows you to catch up on all those candidates who dropped out, all those who have changed policies over and over again and those who stuck to their guns.
It is also seen as an alternative to opinion polls because of the way it reflects on how people are searching for candidates with these two platforms.
As is normal you would see spikes and changes on different issues according to what is happening at that period in time. From these pictures that show what people were interested in from the past week, we can see that it was during the big news that google search trends and twitter activity spiked as is seen by the spike during Governor Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump.
We can all see where the future is headed, and it seems the media outlets are not going to be left behind in their drive to cover the news and for the interested non-voting parties like us this is as good as it gets.
