Ohio Senate: Brown over Mandel in a close race

By JD Chang

There’s a second close race in Ohio that many pundits and political wonks are looking at: Sherrod Brown vs. Josh Mandel. We wrote about them previously when CNN did a piece about their heated debate on October 18th.

Where is the race now? Let’s take a deeper look.

RCP (Brown up by +5.5 poll points)

TrendPo Rank (Brown up by 62 ranks)

The historical graphs for both:

(RCP showing a close race but Mandel opening up a bigger lead in the last few days)

(TrendPo Rank showing an even closer race based on buzz, but still Mandel slightly ahead)

Breaking it down a little more, we can see that Sherrod Brown opened up a lead in the last week with higher National Media and Facebook Gap numbers:

(National Media = 10 national papers like WSJ, NYTimes, WaPo, Fox, CNN, etc.)

(Facebook Gap = the difference in FB Talked Abouts each day)

Most of the other numbers were very close together:

(Sentiment chart)

(Beltway Media)

(Twitter Gap = the gain or loss in Twitter followers each day)

Note that Mandel did gain more Twitter followers the last week, but only slightly higher than Brown. It’s not as much as Brown’s FB Talked About’s edge.

We think that may play a factor into TrendPo Rank showing a tightening of the race over the last day.

However, looking at the historical graph and the social & news indicators, we would call the Ohio race for Sherrod Brown in a close victory. 

DEFINITIONS:

National Media includes: WSJ, LATimes, NYTimes, WaPo, HuffPost, Fox News, CNN, USA Today
Beltway Media includes: Politico, The Hill, Roll Call
FB Likes is the number of Facebook Likes on each person’s page.
Facebook Talked Abouts is the number of unique users who have created a story about a page in a 7 day period.
TW Gap is the number of Twitter Followers gained each day on each person’s Twitter account.

(You can see all of TrendPo Pro’s chart data by subscribing to a free TrendPo Pro user account)

Daily Top Ten — Rand Paul jumping 30 spots

Yesterday we talked about Marco Rubio being in the TrendPo Top Ten based on strong social numbers. But today, Senator Rubio gets knocked out by another online favorite Rand Paul who jumped 30 spots in one day to reach the TrendPo Top Ten.

 

 

Digging deeper into the numbers, we can clearly see Rand Paul getting a bump on Friday from his Facebook Talked Abouts:

 

But what exactly happened Friday on his Facebook page? We went and looked.

Normally, Senator Paul gets a few hundred Facebook shares from his posts — 200, 300, 600, etc. Never over 1,000. But on Thursday Oct. 24th, he shared this image:

This post was shared 16,594 times with 2,658 comments. This was the catalytic post that bumped up his Facebook Talked About numbers so high last week. And it will continue to pad his TrendPo Rank numbers for the next 5 days.

 

Kudos Mr. Paul, for scoring an awesome social post.

 

 

DEFINITIONS:
Facebook Talked Abouts is the number of unique users who have created a story about a page in a 7 day period.

(You can see all of TrendPo Pro’s chart data by subscribing to a free TrendPo Pro user account)