The Iowa Caucuses are tonight. My predictions on the basis of Twitter data from a time-bound (during the townhall) and space-bound (just Iowa) dataset.

Clinton and Sanders are running relatively even. There is a lot of Twitter heat for Sanders, although much of it comes through retweets. Methodologically, this is suspect given the use of Twitter as a transmit medium during media events. Much of the Twitter activity is at least topically about Clinton. The most popular Tweets seem to turn on reclaiming the name ‘socialist.’

The volume of Sanders re-tweets is difficult to process. Thousands of lines of my sample (100,000) are taken by the same tweets.  The near lack of meaningful user content is shocking, over these six months of research it seems like twitter is less democratic by the week.

The Republican ticket is more difficult to predict. In this dataset there is something striking – between the mass Sanders and Clinton retweets, there is a Republican: Rand Paul. Not Trump. Paul.