What Issues Voters Cared About, According to Twitter
Reading the social media tea leaves.
— -- Even though votes may be private, Twitter users turned to social media to talk about the issues closest to their hearts.
Twitter broke down that online chatter and sorted through how frequently certain issues were being discussed by users by sex around lunchtime on the East Coast.
Female Twitter users tweeted more frequently about education, gay rights and wages while men tweeted more about privacy, taxes and energy.
Even more than gender, age appears to show an even more understandable connection between the voters and the issues they are concerned about. First-time voters between the ages of 18 and 24 tweeted largely about education issues, perhaps including student debt.
Young adults between the ages of 25 and 34 focused their social media pining on gay rights while older adults between 35 and 54 wrote mostly about privacy concerns.
Twitter also noted that the eldest age bracket, those Twitter users above 55 years of age, were the ones most concerned about Ebola.
While politicians and fundraisers will inevitably be poring over exit polls -- where voters are asked about what motivated them at the ballot box shortly after they exit their polling place -- but these tweets may also provide some insight into the minds of voters. That said, all of these Twitter findings offer a very limited scope since it only looked at tweets posted between noon and 3 p.m. EST.