Earlier today Jennifer Preston at the New York Times examined popular sentiment on Barack Obama’s Jobs speech, using tweets collected and analyzed by Trendrr. They found that 53 percent of tweets mentioning Barack Obama on Thursday night were positive, while only 19 percent were negative. As one would expect, “some of the harshest comments were from some of the presidential candidates seeking the Republican nomination.” 
See which tweets from the 2012 GOP created the most buzz here.
Yet President Obama is not the only one to release a Jobs plan recently. During the GOP Debate Wednesday at the Reagan Library, presidential hopefuls offered contrasting visions of how to create jobs in America. 140elect teamed up with Globalpoint to see which GOP candidate’s plan for job creation garnered the most support.
Globalpoint specializes in text analytics and sentiment analysis for politics. Their analysis of Twitter sentiment for Obama’s jobs plan meshes with the results from Trendrr, scoring 52 percent positive reaction on Thursday night. Yet Globalpoint contends 72 percent of tweets mentioning one of the 2012 GOP candidates with the word “jobs” were positive. The GOP got 20% more positive reactions than Obama. See the full breakdown in the top graph.
The front-runners have seemed to fare the worst, with Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry racking in the most unfavorable tweets. Don’t let this surprise you. The more serious the candidate, the stronger the attacks from the other side. Tweets attacking Rick Perry surged after he rose in the polls, as with Michele Bachmann. It may be fair to take the higher volume of negative sentiment as a sign of a greater need to attack.
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