Ten days ago I posted a quick overview of the relative frequency with which Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were mentioned by name in #ausvotes tweets (and ‘by name’ here includes mentions of their first and/or last names, as well as of their Twitter account names). What the data showed at that point was a very slight lean towards Abbott on most days, but mainly on low-traffic days – as I said then, Gillard tended to ‘win’ the high-volume days on Twitter. And overall, the tally was almost dead even: 10769:10540 mentions in favour of Gillard.
I thought it might be worth doing an update to cover the last week and a half, too. Here’s how things currently stand:
This is interesting for a number of reasons, then. For one, there’s been a very massive increase in #ausvotes tweets since 2 August – that day, and 11 August as well, have even surpassed the day of the leaders’ debate snoozefest in terms of the overall number of tweets that mention either of the leaders by name (and many other days aren’t far behind).
Also, the balance of mentions has shifted markedly in Abbott’s favour over the last few days, which becomes more obvious if we normalise the graph to 100%:
Since 2 August, when #ausvotes went ballistic, Gillard was mentioned significantly more often only on three days (2, 7, and 9 August), and even on those she was ahead only by up to 14%. By contrast, Abbott ‘won’ 4, 8, and 10 August, and in the latter two cases by over 20%.
You’ll note that I’m putting ‘won’ in inverted commas once again: Abbott led Gillard by 73%:27% of personal mentions on 10 August, for example, but even without looking at those tweets in detail I’d hazard a guess that the majority of them were referring to the Coalition’s deeply flawed policy on broadband, and to Abbott’s excruciating performance trying to explain it on the 7.30 Report that day, and were far from positive in nature overall. Which leads me to wonder – and that’s a research task for another day – whether ‘winning’ this particular political contest is actually a positive, or whether an increased number of mentions on Twitter is more likely to be an indicator of a campaign in trouble. If the latter, this would certainly fit the current media narrative, which claims to see signs that the momentum of the election campaign has swung back towards Gillard for the moment…
Finally, a few baseline data points: as I mentioned in the last post, between 17 July and 2 August the total number of mentions for each leader was roughly even – 10769:10540 in favour of Gillard. That balance has now swung towards Abbott: we’re at 27097:24163 now. And most of that lead was generated over the past couple of days alone: during 10 and 11 August, Tony Abbott received a whopping 2618 more mentions than Julia Gillard. Something’s definitely going on here – whether it continues through to the end of the campaign remains to be seen.
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