A Machine Learning Based Strategy for Election Result Prediction

Predicting election results is a hot area in political science. In the last decade, social media has been widely used in political elections. Most approaches can predict the result of a national election. However, it is still challenging to predict the overall results of many local elections. This paper presents a machine learning based strategy to analyze Twitter data for predicting the overall results of many local elections. To verify the effectiveness of this strategy, we apply it for analyzing the Twitter data based on the 2018 midterm election in United States. The results suggest the predicted results are close to the actual election outcome.