The 7th London Mayoral Election Twitter Poll

Poll findings
1) Has peace and harmony broken out on the London front? Not quite but Ken, Jenny, Brian and Siobhan all have better percentage figures for both positive and negative today. Boris is 2% better off on his negative but 4% down on his positive so not a big change there.

2) Volume of tweets was down alot especially Boris and Ken but Siobhan's also fell a little. Suspect it's because it's a Saturday but Jenny's and Brian's volume increased. I would put this down to hustings today I think there was one organised by Stonewall and another Youth one. So that means less time for Boris and Ken to get on the telly hence their figures go down. Jenny and Brian get equal billing and hence see increases in their total. Well that's my theory anyway.

3) Ken has had a difficult week on the trail but is he starting to turn the corner? Yesterday the gap between Boris and Ken's negative percentage was 18% ie 39 vs 21 today it's 25 vs 18. If and it's a big if this improvement continues there starts to be a realistic argument to move the race back from leans Boris to toss-up between the two.

4) There's going to be a Yougov poll on the London Mayoral race on Monday that'll be a big day for the Benita campaign. If she fails to register again like ComRes than it's going to look like a campaign in a social media bubble with little resonance on the ground. But it'll be worth looking at the question as the ComRes one disadvantaged the smaller campaigns by not mentioning their candidate name in the question. Today she's won the Mary Poppins award for the highest positive rating and the lowest negative one as well.

5) UKIP an the BNP failed to make the cut. AGAIN. So clearly not putting the effort in.

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.


Results

      Candidate Pos7 Neut7 Neg7 Tot7 Negpercent7 Pospercent7
1       Ken Lab  309   539  276 1124          25          27
2     Boris Con  202   349  129  680          19          30
3   Jenny Green  165   321   92  578          16          29
4 Brian Lib Dem  123   206   64  393          16          31
5   Siobhan Ind  224   297   81  602          13          37