2020 Political Atlas

Our goal is to provide multiple independent data sources allowing everyone to reach their own conclusions on what will happen in the 2020 elections.

This site is a collaboration between the UVA Center for Politics and Ipsos. Ipsos collects social media mentions of all major candidates for President with sources including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, local news websites, and many others. Ipsos has developed AI-driven approaches for measuring candidate net social favorability, share of social voice and main issue tagging as well as bot detection. Additionally, Ipsos measures velocity associated with discussion of a specific candidate or issue, therefore providing immediate insight whether this conversation is becoming more relevant to potential voters. Ipsos excludes any mentions originating from outside of the state where the election is being held, in order to not over-inflate any particular sentiment that may not represent locally-held opinions. Ipsos does not provide a social media trend score for races with insufficient social media volume. Ipsos will continue to monitor these races and provide only raw social media indicators until statistically significant volume is available for the algorithm to provide a trend score. Ipsos analyzes YouTube and US newspaper traffic to identify the most shared stories and videos associated with a particular political candidate daily and weekly. Additionally, Ipsos collects publicly released Facebook political advertising data to provide accurate estimations of digital information campaigns in the 2020 elections.