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Donor Sentiment Analysis of Presidential Primary Candidates using SAS®

Aditya Jakkam & Swetha Nallamala

Master’s in Business Analytics, Oklahoma State University

Introduction

When the president of United States makes a bold statement, it’s response is seen all over the world with social mediaflooding with messages, news channels repeating the telecast all through the day, debate sessions, etc. Such is thepower of president of the world’s most powerful country. The result of who will be the next president decides on thepresent primary candidates. Observing and analyzing the candidate statements reaction on different issues can helpthe candidates in understanding the public opinion of the matter. This is also impacting the donations made to thecandidates. The objective of this paper is to use SAS to predict the sentiment analysis of the donors based on theissues disusing by the candidates. The collected data set contains around 1000000 of observations and 18 variables.We also collected more than 25000 tweets from the twitter for the analysis.

Methods

Data Preparation and Analysis

• The data was obtained from the federal election commission website and twitter. The data has variables ofgeographical location, donation sum, tweet info, and other information of the donor.

Fig 1. Data Preparation

• The issues which we selected are guns, immigration, economy, foreign policy and health care. Around 3000 tweetswere collected for each topic and for each presidential primary. We performed Sentiment Analysis using SASSentiment Studio. We built a statistical model by manually marking around 200 positive and negative tweets. Thenwe analyzed the tweets from 6 different topics and observed that overall they are classified as negative as majorityof people expressed their dissatisfaction and only few are tweets backing the candidates.

Fig 2. Sentiment Distribution

• We then performed further Text analysis using enterprise miner.

Fig 3. Miner design

Guns

Fig 4. Trump & Guns Fig 5. Hillary & Guns

• From the above concept links, we can observe that Hillary has a lot of negativity on her stand taken on guns, whichwas misinterpreted as taking away guns entirely.

• She was constantly named dictator and compared to Hitler, Stalin. People even started finding similarities betweenObama and Hillary on their stands taken regarding guns.

• Trump on the other hand, have support from quite a few and people calling out patriots for fight against terrorismwith guns. They all tend to give their support to Trump on this aspect.

Taxes

Fig 6. Hillary & Taxes Fig 7. Trump & Taxes

• People are expressing satisfaction with Hillary showing her taxes. But highly discredited that if she comes there is agreater chance that middle class people get to pay more taxes.

• Trump, on the other hand is constantly challenged by people for his stand on taxes.

Federal Election Commission data

Twitter DataFinal

• Concept links were generated using the output from the text filter. We used the clustered output from text clusternode to understand and analyze the tweets.

Results

Methods Continued

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Donor Sentiment Analysis of Presidential Primary Candidates using SAS®

Aditya Jakkam & Swetha Nallamala

Master’s in Business Analytics, Oklahoma State University

Results Continued

Immigration

• Hillary is discredited by quite a few saying her open borders immigration policies is going to drive down wages for allAmericans. Her campaign proposals on startup visas are appreciated by few and contradicted more.

• Trump’s statements about deporting immigrants and building a wall are called unethical by quite a few. The wordunethical is strongly related when analyzing the twitter data on Trump’s immigration stand

Gay Marriage

• People are calling Hillary as from “gay marriage protect party”

• Trump is facing allegations of being against LGBT community and women rights. People are voicing their concernsabout gay marriages being affected if Trump becomes the President

Fig 8. Trump & Foreign Policy Fig 9. Hillary & Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy

• Hillary foreign policy is more related to it’s allies and the dangers that comes with it.

• Trump on the other hand his policies is majorly linked to the terrorism.

Education

• People retweeted Hillary’s statement “"Hard to believe they spent so much time talking about me and no timetalking about jobs or education or health care." on Trump. This shows their agreement that Trump needs to addressEducation instead of talking about Hillary.

Fig 10. Trump & Healthcare

CONCLUSIONSResults Continued

Veterans• People express their concerns that immigration issue not only impacts the wage of Americans but also it affects

Veterans.• Hillary is backed more than Trump in this aspect, as she shows strong commitment to Veterans by selecting Tim

Kaine as her running mate.HealthCare• Hillary’s health care plan is called bold by most of the tweeters whereas for trump it is showing he needs to do

more work on it.

Fig 11. Hillary & Total Donation Fig 12. Hillary & Count (State wise)

Fig 13. Trump & Total Donation Fig 14. Trump & Count (State wise)

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Donor Sentiment Analysis of Presidential Primary Candidates using SAS®

Aditya Jakkam & Swetha Nallamala

Master’s in Business Analytics, Oklahoma State University

Results Continued

• Hillary has got lot of donations from New York and California. Even though the donations from New York is morecompared to California, in terms of count the number of donors from California is more than the New York.

• Hillary received a total sum of $264.4 millions out of which the donations with $200 or less has $118.3 millions anddonations with $2000 or more has $110.7 millions.

• Trump on the other hand received only $89 millions in donation and the major part has come from Texas, Californiaand Florida.

• Overall, we can see that people are using twitter more as a platform for expressing their opposition ordissatisfaction for the stand taken by the presidential primaries on certain issues.

• Donald Trump as usual is the hot topic of all tweets.

• Hillary’s facing lot of opposition on her stand on the issue of guns. People are supporting her on her tax reformsover Trump but some people are still expressing that she will be impeding more taxes and find loopholes for theriches.

• The major threat to Hillary is there are a lot of misinterpretations going around on what she said. Her words areunderstood in a different way and people are expressing their dislike on her stands.

• Donations on the other hand is affecting based on the comments made by the candidates. When Hillary talksagainst the Guns, the donations from Texas and Florida has come down when compared to Trump who issupporting the Guns.

• From the data California, New York, Texas and Florida states are majorly participating in the elections by donating tothe candidates.

• It looks like recent increase in the terror attacks is showing major impact on the elections as major part of thetweets talks about it.

CONCLUSIONSConclusion

Conclusion

• The scope of this project can be extended to different other issues and can be compared it’s effect on thedonations. It can be further extended in analysis the winning prospect of the candidates from the sentimentanalysis.

• Text Mining and Analysis: Practical Methods, Examples, and Case Studies Using SAS® by Goutam Chakraborty,Murali Pagolu, Satish Garla.

• SAS Institute Inc. 2014. Getting Started with SAS® Text Miner 13.2. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.

• We thank Analytics Experience 2016 conference committee for giving us an opportunity to present our work.

• We also thank Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, Director of Business Analytics, Oklahoma State University for his continuoussupport and guidance.

Future Scope

References

Acknowledgement