So, just over 24 hours to go until the polls close and counting begins in the election we had to have – and I thought it was time again to have a look at how mentions of the two leaders in tweets tagged with the #ausvotes hashtag are shaping up.
You’ll remember that Gillard was leading this contest ever so slightly on 2 August (10769:10540), and that Abbott had pulled ahead 27097:24163 by 12 August. And that lead has blown out further over the past few days – as of midnight on 19 August, Tony Abbott is leading Julia Gillard by a whopping 41088:33071! For whatever reason, #ausvotes Twitterers have been mentioning Abbott a whole lot more than Gillard over the past week.
No doubt what’s going on here is more than just simple endorsement – rather, as a gradual narrowing in the opinion polls is being reported, this may well be a sign of increased discussion about what the election of an Abbott government may mean for Australia. Perhaps (and that’s still a big perhaps) what we’re seeing here is a sign of incumbency: however little time Gillard herself has had in the top job, after the last three years, a Labor government is a relatively known quantity, while it’s still unclear what a Coalition government may do in the future.
Anyway – here are the usual graphs:
And normalised to 100%, to show the relative strength of both leaders on each day:
The picture is pretty obvious, then: of the past 10 days, Gillard has ‘won’ only one, and Abbott has led by more than 20 percentage points on eight…
Indeed, here’s a slightly different way to show this – a cumulative graph of mentions. What’s obvious from this: the two leaders are practically in lockstep until 9 August, but the day after, Abbott starts streaking ahead (hmm, sorry for that mental image). 10 August is the day of Abbott’s stumble over the details of his broadband policy on the 7.30 Report – but (even on Twitter) surely that can’t be the only reason for this notable divergence from that day onward?
For now, your guess is as good as mine. Tomorrow, we’ll see how these observations correlate with the real election result…
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