Politics Can Facebook Predict Who Wins the Senate in 2014?

So far, we have trained our forecasting model on four key Senate elections in North Carolina, Alaska, Kentucky and Michigan. In those races, our two-party contest Facebook model shows Republicans potentially picking up one seat.

According to our Facebook forecast, in North Carolina, incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat, leads State House Speaker Thom Tillis, the leading Republican contender, by 52.7 to 47.3. In the open Michigan Senate race, Democratic Rep. Gary Peters leads the announced Republican candidate, former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, 55.6 to 44.4. And, assuming he survives a primary challenge, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell holds a 53.9 to 46.1 lead over Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic secretary of state. In Alaska, Democratic Sen. Mark Begich is in a dead heat whether he faces Joe Miller, the 2010 Republican Senate nominee, or Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell.

So why does our model work? The main reason is scale: Social media, and especially Facebook, is now ubiquitous. It’s “virtual” in the sense that it’s online, but the interactions between candidates and voters are no less real. There are more than 128 million daily active Facebook users in the United States, and they spend an average of 114 billion minutes a month browsing the site. In 2012, 12 percent of election spending went to social media, a 616 percent increase from 2008. Because page metrics such as “page likes” and “people talking about this” are public, Facebook has also become a real-time measuring stick that allows campaigns, pundits and analysts to gauge how well campaigns organize and connect with supporters. What we’re now discovering in our work and our research is that online engagement translates to real success in the field and at the polls.

As the general election Senate contests become clearer, we will expand our Facebook modeling to all highly contested Senate races. Starting in April—8 months out from the election—we’ll start publishing updated reports and predictions weekly.

How accurate will the model’s predictions be? We’ll have to wait until November. But if the 2012 election is any indication, our simple model may perform as well as polling in forecasting two-party, head-to-head outcomes of Senate general elections across the United States.