What do the Irish think about Trump and Clinton?

It’s everyone’s favourite subject right now, the US election. Unless you’ve somehow avoided consuming any form of media over the last few months, you’ll have no doubt been exposed to a lot of opinions and “facts” about the two front runners for the US election Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

With such a media overload, it’s hard not to form our own ideas about who should be elected and who shouldn’t. It’s a strange phenomenon, the world being so invested in an election for a nation we have no vote in. The American people will vote for an American president, and yet the rest of the world seems to feel like we’re involved in the decision.

With this in mind, we here at Idiro Analytics decided to get a clearer understanding of the opinions of people here in Ireland surrounding the election. Do the opinions of the Irish people differ from those of the rest of the world?

To do this we chose to use Twitter as our source of public opinion to do an analysis on. We gathered thousands of tweets posted about the election over a 24 hour period in the days leading up to the election and ran a sentiment analysis on them.

This means we were able to break down each tweet and work out the sentiment (overall feelings) being expressed by analysing the types of words being used in each tweet. From this, we can then chart if the majority of tweets being posted about both Clinton and Trump are positive or negative and the general feelings behind each one.

First, let’s look at the sentiment for both Clinton and Trump worldwide:

One interesting note from the two charts above is the huge difference in the number of tweets being posted about each person. The number of people tweeting about Trump is over three times higher than the number of people tweeting about Hillary.
If we break this down further into just positive and negative sentiments, we can see that the majority of Tweets being posted worldwide about both Clinton and Trump are negative.

Now let’s look at the sentiment of Irish people towards the two. (Note that in order to get a large enough sample to analyse, we used tweets posted by people in Ireland over 4 to 6 days leading up to the election)

From looking at the chart above, it’s strange that even after all we’ve read about Trump over the past year, we’re still surprised by him.

Although it’s not by a huge amount, we can see that the sentiment towards Hillary in Ireland is positive compared to the negative worldwide sentiment towards her, whereas Trump is still negative.
Lastly, let’s combine the worldwide sentiment for both Hillary and Trump versus the sentiment towards them in Ireland.

From these last two charts we can see that the Irish people have a little more fear and anger about the future than the rest of the world. Is there something we know that they don’t?