Is there an issue?

Voters care about several issues; these issues define our elections. We set out to create a product that could monitor voter sentiment across various issues in real-time. Our goal was twofold: to predict which issues would be most important in the 2022 election cycle and to gauge where voters stood on them. We named it “LUX Voter Watch 2022.”

My role was, first and foremost, to read the news, but with a twist: I wasn’t looking for what happened yesterday or today. Instead, I needed to analyze these events to look ahead to what was likely to happen in the coming weeks and months. Each day, I updated a spreadsheet of topics, sorting between relevant and irrelevant stories. I also looked for hints of stories to come (seeing the abortion case on the Supreme Court docket, for instance, was certainly prescient). I further grouped these into subtopics and predicted the length of each news cycle. Once we had a sense of the issues, I created rule sets in Illumina’s data streaming tool, LUX, to detect social media posts about each issue. LUX’s machine-learning algorithms then sorted each post based on gender, political affiliation, sentiment, and location. These algorithms can additionally infer how the post authors feel about issues in regard to specific candidates. I continually review LUX’s outputs, refining the rules as necessary to increase their accuracy as well as adding new issues as they arise.

The end result is currently live: a beautiful visualization of issue and candidate tracking in real-time. Check it out here.