For the past year I've been working on a system to monitor sentiment in political blogs. PolVox is a working prototype that monitors know political blogs. It provides trend analysis charts and a keyword search interface. While it still has a lot of bugs in it (Like double counting some things) I would like to point out a few things to you.
My system shows that republicans hate their candidates. First up is John McCain, followed by Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee. The only candidates that seem to be doing ok are Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani. Since Rudy is gone and republicans don't take Ron Paul seriously they're stuck with a distasteful set of candidates.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both are doing quite well within their own parties.
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Ron Paul is the kind of candidate though that is going to get major praise amongst his supporters, but has been written off by the mainstream voter. So I'd say that makes sense, being as though his supporters are going to write good things about him (and often), while people who don't support him are likely not to give him the time of day.
I don't know that I'd draw the conclusion that they hate their candidates, I'd just say they have a much more packed election with people from different political ideologies. On the democrat side though, theres a lot of overlap in the platforms of both candidates, so if policy is driving sentiment, it makes sense that democrats are happy campers either way. It'd be interesting to see how this changes though once the republicans nominate a candidate though, since the republican party usually heals itself up with a cohesive message by the time the election rolls around. McCain and Bush in 2000 had widely different messages, but it doesnt seem like McCain followers had a problem voting for Bush come election day.
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