Who watched the Ontario Election Leader’s Debate?

For the first time in my adult life I was not in the campaign office on debate night.  Usually my interaction with the Leaders’ debate has involved organizing my Leaders’ activities in and around the debate.  But this time I was home in my basement taking notes, one eye on the television, and one eye on my tablet tracking the dialogue on the #voteon and #onpoli Twitter hashtags.  And as I sat there “working”, enthralled as only a political junkie like me can be a couple of questions entered my mind.  They were prompted by two things: my watch and the noises coming from upstairs.   This debate started at 6:30 pm.  What do people normally do around 6:30 pm on a week night?  As evidenced by the clamour I heard it involved something like corralling the kids to eat dinner, bathe and get ready for bed.   Was I courting serious trouble by not helping with the kids, and was anyone else watching this thing?  The answer was affirmative on both counts.

According to Edelman ELECT’s tracking we saw a massive upswing in the twitter traffic on debate night, with over 21,000 tweets attributed to the three main parties and their leaders.  To be sure much of the conversation was taken up by party apparatchiks of all stripes, hard core supporters, and reporters.  Much of that dialogue typically consisted of some kind of instantaneous commentary on the leaders and their performances or regurgitation of party talking points.  But that coverage doesn’t wholly explain the dramatic size of the numbers.  People tuned in and many of them shared their thoughts on Twitter.

As they have throughout the campaign, Liberals and Conservatives dominated the share of voice gobbling up almost 80% of the traffic.  As for sentiment, it appears that while Andrea Horwath and the NDP made up only 18.7% of the total tweets she garnered the highest percentage of positive tweets, of the three leaders at 32%.  Conservative leader Tim Hudak scored the worst with only 19% of tweets viewed as positive.  Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty scored mildly better than Hudak with nearly a quarter of tweets related to him and his party as positive.  All three leaders came away with a similarly negative percentage of tweets, with McGuinty and Horwarth generating 27% negative tweets, and Hudak 30%.   It appears that sentiment expressed about Horwath is crystallized more than McGuinty and Hudak.

If the traffic tells us anything, it’s that people are becoming increasingly engaged as the campaign enters its final week.  This is typical of any political campaign in Canada.  It remains to be seen whether the online dialogue will maintain the level of volume we saw on debate night and into yesterday (today’s numbers suggest it will not).  Moreover, as we get closer to E-Day will the sentiment around the leaders and their parties further crystallize?