Born out of curiosity by the team at Wowza.

Immediately after Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election against Mitt Romney, we noticed a few forum threads and comments mentioned something interesting: Mitt Romney's Facebook page was losing likes at a precipitous pace. Refreshing the page would show the count shrinking by 20 or 30 likes every few seconds.

We thought this was fascinating. Romney's page was not actively posting content, it wasn't polluting news feeds, and his policies and beliefs hadn't changed. Did people just decide to unlike the guy because he lost? One of our developers, Zack Carlson, set out to chart this by recording the likes on Romney's page every 5 minutes.

Zack's Mitt Romney Like Watch

From November 9 through April 20, 2012, Romney's Facebook page lost 577,087 likes. This averaged out to losing 3,540 likes a day. And it wasn't at a consistent rate; there were periods in which he actually gained likes, and other 5-minute periods where he would lose 2,000 likes at once. Time went on and we all forgot about Mitt Romney and moved on.

Now, as the 2016 election cycle started to heat up, the idea resurfaced – but in a slightly bigger way. We wondered what picture the aggregate total of likes and followers across a wide field of candidates might show us, compared against the daily news cycle.

The premise is simple – what does a candidate's indicated popularity on social media look like over the course of an election season? With so many active users on Facebook and Twitter, does this mean anything?

Throughout the election cycle we'll be pulling data from Facebook, Google and other sources to illuminate the Presidential election. We built eLIKEtion because we thought that putting the data together could be interesting. We hope others do too.

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Wowza specializes in building highly understandable responsive data displays. So if you'd like us to build something useful and beautiful like this for you, get in touch with us at contact@wowza.biz.