Debate Fallout

We see some interesting movement in our monitoring of the Presidential Campaign after last night's debate with Hillary Clinton closing the online gap down to 3 points. Interestingly, we can see that this increase in support for Clinton started back on the 23rd and she has been picking up momentum for the last four days.

What is driving this increase in online support? Our model uses a candidate's online mentions and the sentiment of those mentions as the two main factors (along with other indicators that have a smaller effect on the final number) to calculate our Support Index. While we have watched Trump being mentioned twice as often as Clinton online over the past six weeks, the sentiment of those mentions has equaled or exceeded the sentiment expressed towards Clinton. This started to change in the lead up to the debates on both fronts. Clinton closed the mention gap but more importantly, the sentiment towards her started to increase.

During last night's debate and into today, Clinton's sentiment has jumped ahead of Trump's significantly, causing her support index to increase by taking support away from Trump and switching undecideds into her column. So it does appear that most people (based on the comments from 200,000+ users we processed during the debate) felt Clinton outperformed Trump last night. We'll keep watching to see if she can sustain her momentum!