In recent years, and particularly during the first 2012 presidential debate, social sites reached an all-time high as the media most used by the American people through which to voice their opinions. This Huffington Post article below shows how voters took to Twitter during the first presidential debate at an overwhelming rate for the first time in political history.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/presidential-debate-twitter-record_n_1939050.html
Using new innovative tools like Wordle, you can get a feel for how the candidates are faring during debate nights by running a regression on Wordle for key words or phrases each candidate uses, and plotting it against what people on popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Tumblr are tweeting or posting. This could be used as a tool or metric to help identify who won the debate and later help to show the correlation between the winner of the election and what that candidate said during those debates where they emerged the winner. With different analysis from Wordle one could come up with various relationships between the winner of the general election and those who fared well in the debates.
This Interactive Graph prove that the momentum or lack there of, can offer candidates a chance to change the mind of voters.
This interactive graph shows an interesting relationship between the two candidates and helps to answer our question of whether winning debates ultimately leads to being elected president. What makes the graph a good tool is its interactive abilities and the fact that we could see the changes during different periods of the year. Since we are interested in the debates we could use the map to see what happened to the candidates before and after the debates. On August 20th for the first time you see the gap between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney narrowed considerably in polls. This was because Mitt Romney had recently clinched the nomination of his party and had their 2012 Republican National Convention the following week on the 27th. After that most of the movement in the polls was due to the debates. This is quite evident by the sudden and sharp movement of the polls towards each other right after the first debate on the October 3rd, which most pundits, the general public, and even Obama himself believed Mitt Romney won. That helps to convey the argument that winning debates gives candidates momentum, which can then be used to gain positive media coverage as well as voter response.