Twitter Study Provides Insight Into How, Why Trump Won 2016 Election

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Could Twitter have predicted the outcome of the 2016 general election? A 14-month study of Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s tweets may provide insight into how and why the Republican won the presidency.

Jiebo Luo and Yu Wang, two Ph.D students at the University of Rochester at the time of the 2016 paper, examined both candidates’ feeds, making a number of astute observations over a series of eight papers. “We wanted to understand how each of the candidate’s campaigns evolved, and be able to explain why someone won or lost,” Luo, an associate professor of computer science, says in a university release.


Perhaps more deeply explaining the outcome, Luo and Wang conclude that Clinton’s base of female supporters didn’t exceed Trump’s. A general phenomenon observed in many past elections has been a “gender affinity effect,” in which females predominantly vote for a female candidate.



Although their methods may not have been 100% accurate, they were able to draw from a dramatically larger sample size than other methods, such as polls. “In the end, even though we chose not to make any predictions, we were not surprised at all that Donald Trump won,” says Luo.
