A quick look at the Facebook primaries numbers is merited following the Democratic presidential candidate debates (hosted by CNN & YouTube). I’m not so much interested in number of supporters (every candidate gained supporters), as much as percent change in number of supporters (7/23—7/25) relative to the previous percent change (7/17—7/23). Note that 7/23 recorded figures are pre-debate figures.
Of course, since the two time periods are identical (the first has barely two days; the second has nearly a week), no comparison is perfect. But the hypothesis was that percent change in support for candidates is not randomly distributed; a post-debate “bump” in support for candidates should be noticeable. Similarly, if the debates generate any “buzz” in the Facebook crowd, then median percent change in for Democratic candidates should be larger than for GOP candidates.
Both hypotheses are supported by the evidence. The median percent change in support for Democratic candidates was +4.10% (compared to +2.20% for GOP candidates). Still, there was some wide differences: The largest percent increase for a GOP candidate was for Fred Thompson (+4.50%), who only recently entered the Facebook race & seems to have strong momentum. The smallest percent increase for a Democratic candidate was for Barack Obama (+1.21%), but he might have “peaked” since he also has more than half of all declared Facebook presidential supporters.
There was also considerable change in support for individual candidates from one time period to the other. Only one candidate had a sharper increase in support: Joe Biden (+8.03%). Of course, the figures could be skewed, since the earlier time period includes a larger number of days. If we correct for this (taking the percent increase for 7/17—7/23 and halving it), more candidate outperform: Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Mike Gravel, and Chris Dodd. Of course, using this formula, Biden’s performance looks even more impressive.
In keeping w/ our first hypothesis, when similarly correcting the GOP figures, none of the GOP candidates’ results change.
Next time, I hope to update the candidate figures w/in an hour of the debates, rather than a full day later.
