US Gubernatorial Elections
Virginia and New Jersey will elect their governors on November 7, 2017. There appears to be a rather broad consensus that the Democratic candidate (Murphy) will win in New Jersey. In Virginia, however, the race seems too close to call between Republican (Gillespie) and Democratic (Northam) candidates when using traditional data. Recent polls which include data collection dates from November 1 or later are split, with four showing Northam leading, three showing Gillespie leading, and two indicating a tie.
Social Media Influence (SMI) State-Level Disclaimer
SMI forecasts have worked very well for national-level elections in numerous countries. One of the keys is to have a high degree of social media activity regarding the election. Applying the same concepts to elections on a state-level is somewhat more problematic as the sample size decreases and the possibility for distortions increases. In addition to the more traditional disclaimers of SMI being a new forecasting method, the smaller sample size in state-level elections should be considered when looking at these forecasts.
SMI Forecasts
For New Jersey, SMI clearly shows the Democratic candidate winning rather easily. This is in-line with polls and political analysts.
For Virginia, there is no clear consensus using traditional data. In fact, looking at polls it seems to be fairly evenly split with a slight advantage to Northam, the Democrat. SMI, however, indicates that Northam has a significant lead and that the lead has been fairly steady over the last month. SMI ratings surged for Gillespie as the Latino Victory Fund commercial that appears to depict Republicans as racists was widely criticized. At the peak of this issue, Gillespie’s SMI surged to pull even with that of Northam but did not surpass it. In other words, given plenty of sympathetic publicity due to poor public reaction to an election commercial, Gillespie’s SMI was still unable to supersede that of Northam’s.
Given the relative performance of SMI ratings, it simply does not look like Gillespie has much of a chance going into election-day. Polls have flipped back and forth but SMI has remained doggedly in favor of Northam in the last month. We expect a rather wide margin of victory for the Democrats in Virginia which implies considerable outperformance of current polls.