The 3rd London Mayoral Election Twitter Poll

Click on pictures to enlarge.

Poll findings
1) Manifesto launches are a bit like Birthdays for political candidates except they hand out the presents I was really happy I was able to pick up on this is Brian Paddick's tweeter presence. Volume up, positive tweets up, negative tweets down. This is Mr Paddicks best poll by some way.

2) Perhaps the tax storm is dying down as Ken's negative rating is down quite strongly. The fact that he's level pegging on sentiment, if not quite on volume, is something of a vindication as the ComRes poll had them not too far apart. Boris's stats are roughly back where they were two days ago.

3) What to do about Siobhan Benita? That is the question that will be taxing the mind of many involved in the London Mayoral Election. ComRes had her nowhere. Twitter says different. We'll see who's right on election day. I don't think she has the kind of ground operation that the main parties have and if she starts to pose a threat to the other candidates she can expect a rougher ride than she's had up to now. ComRes doesn't mention her name in the polling question which they do for the 3 main party candidate's which could be a source of bias. But Twitter is well Twitter. I'd expect her to get 3-5% at the moment but if she does keep getting momentum then that could increase.

4) Jenny Jones has polled a little worse today but it's not a huge variation. Her volume was up slightly but she is by some way behind the others who also made the cut for our poll.


5) Talking of the cut UKIP and the BNP didn't make it today. Although it was good to find @UKIPWebb4London and we look forward to mentioning him more often should they get over 20 proper mentions. Not a high bar by anymeans.

Free free to compare to yesterdays poll which you can find here

How does the poll work 

Tweets are collected from Twitter and then counted to give the volume figures and then they are classified by the sentiment package which is an addition to the R programming language I use for this. They're classified based on the content of the tweet. So something like "Love @mayoroflondon he's brilliant" would end up in the positive pile while "I'm going to rip Boris Johnson's ugly evil head off if no bus in 30secs" would end up in the negative pile. If it's not quite to obvious then there's the neutral category.

Poll figures

      Candidate Pos3 Neut3 Neg3 Tot3 Pospercent3 Negpercent3
1       Ken Lab  244   648  386 1278          19          30
2     Boris Con  259   681  407 1347          19          30
3   Jenny Green   63    80   58  201          31          29
4 Brian Lib Dem  200   202   86  488          41          18
5   Siobhan Ind  166   205   55  426          39          13