Facebook Users Help Predict Republican Election-Night Victories
Facebook Inc., the world’s most popular social-networking site, helped predict more than 70 percent of competitive U.S. House and Senate races, based on the number of people becoming fans of candidates on the site.
Facebook members picked 74 percent of the winning candidates among 98 hotly contested House races, Facebook said today. In the Senate, more than 80 percent of candidates with more Facebook fans than opponents won their elections.
“The ability for social-media participation and activity to predict election results has been widely discussed over the past several months as political campaigns across the country turned to Facebook to communicate authentically with voters as well as organize supporters,” the company said on its site.
The company, which has more than 500 million users worldwide, is an increasingly important arena for candidates to reach voters. Candidates for governor, senator and other offices relied on the site to show photos of campaign stops or the latest polling information. Users can click a “like” button on the site to show their allegiance to a candidate.
In the U.S. House, 69 candidates with more fans won, while 24 candidates with more Facebook fans lost, the company said. Five races are still too close to call. Forty-six House Democrat incumbents lost their seats yesterday, and more than 78 percent of them had fewer fans than their rivals, Facebook said. The company, located in Palo Alto, California, didn’t base the findings on formal polling.
In Florida, Marco Rubio had the largest fan base of any senatorial candidate, with more than 132,000. The Republican beat Kendrick Meek, a Democrat, and Charlie Crist, an independent, to win the election.
Even so, Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, lost a House race to Republican challenger Daniel Webster despite having more Facebook fans. Grayson had more than 30,000 fans, compared with Webster’s roughly 4,600, Facebook said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
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