Mapping India's Elections Via Twitter

While the world eagerly awaits the election results on 16th May, 2014, the results seem to be clear on twitter. According to data shared by Twitter India, BJP's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, seems to be the clear winner according to the number of times mentioned. The data which spans over 56 million election related tweets from January 1st - May 12th shows that Narendra Modi was the most popular election related term (11.1 million tweets) followed by the Aam Aadmi Party (Arvind Kejriwal) and the BJP. Congress scion, Rahul Gandhi ranked in as the fifth most tweeted while his party came in at the tenth spot. In fact,

exit polls are showing that the Congress may be headed for its worst ever showing in a Lok Sabha election with a tally of less than 100. Four television channels – NewsX, India TV, ABP News and CNN-IBN – put the NDA well past the half-way mark of 272. NewsX and India TV projected 289 seats for the NDA while ABP News gave it 281 seats. The CNN-IBN tally for the NDA was in the 279-282 range. You can view the India map below.

(Note: this article first appeared in The Hindu. Read here)