Earlier this week we took a look at what the social universe thought about a mayoral election that was happening in our hometown of Toronto. Sticking with the same theme we thought it would be interesting to take a look at another upcoming election.

Next week in the United States residents will head to the polls to cast their vote in the mid-term election. For those of you unfamiliar with what the mid-term elections are about (like I was until five minutes ago) here’s a good brief explanation from the good folks of the BBC:

“The elections are called mid-terms because they come halfway through the four-year term served by the president, though the polls are in fact for Congress – the two houses of the US legislature – and for some state governorships (gubernatorial elections).

In Congress, all 435 members of the House of Representatives face the voters, as they do every two years. But only a third of the 100 members of the Senate are up for election at any one time. This year 36 Senate seats are being contested and there are 37 gubernatorial elections.”

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, we looked at some chatter happening in the social media universe about the mid-term elections.

If we look at our popularity chart for the past six months we can see that people have been talking about the election for a while, but as the voting day draws closer the talk seems to increase.

We then decided to delve into some demographics and see just who was talking about the upcoming election in the past month. When we looked at age, it’s interesting to see that the share of voice between people of legal age to vote was almost even all around. People aged 21-35 were talking about it just as much as those 51 and over with both having 31.4% of voice, and those aged 36-50 very close behind with 29.6%.

We looked at which states the chatter was coming from. Here we can see that New York had the most political chat with 13.7% followed by California (12.5%). The next two most talkative states were Texas (6.6%) and Pennsylvania (6.2%).

Next we decided to analyze some info about the two major parties in the US, the Republicans and Democrats. Looking at the share of voice between the two parties we see that they are almost in a dead even heat.

From there we looked at the sentiment around each party. Looking at the graph below we see that there is more positive sentiment for the Republicans (48% vs 42%), but at the same time they also have more negative sentiment aimed at them (23% vs 21%).

As a non-US resident this looks like a pretty close race to me, but there is still five days left until the election and only time can tell what will happen.