Localspeak

It’s Politics As Usual for Spanish-Speaking Latino Voters

1 February 2012

Now that the battleground state of Florida is neatly tucked away in Mitt Romney’s pocket, he and rival GOP candidate Newt Gingrich— based on the emotional pitch of their campaign rhetoric—will likely continue to beat their acerbic path down the Republican primary trail. Although Mr. Romney opposes the Dream Act, he won 54% of Republican Latino voters, owing much to the fact that immigration is not an issue with Florida’s Cuban residents. However, immigration is a huge issue nationally, and his stance on immigration is certain to enter a tougher playing field among Latinos in other states.

In this blog, Localspeak begins our Social Latino 2012 Campaign Digest using NetBase tools to analyze NLP processed Spanish-language social media forums. In monitoring social media political sentiment among Spanish-speaking Latinos, as measured by the emotional value of language in particular, we will gauge trending political and social issues and passion intensity in this Spanish-speaking sector of the population.

As the chart below shows, the January sentiment trend for Romney among Spanish posters exhibits spikes in the blue net sentiment trend line. Vacillating from a low 11% to a high of 85%, the spikes accurately correlate with Latino voter emotional response to Romney’s wins and losses and issues raised in his January campaign.

Mitt Romney Net Sentiment Trend – January

With 92% negative primary ads running during the last week (according to CNN ), our NetBase Spanish sentiment charts help identify key emotions. For a deeper analysis of language intensity and context—for any single emotion, attribute, or behavior automatically generated—we can export and map the verbatim posts to discover not only what triggered the response but also its root cause.

We extracted several emblematic sound bites from the Emotions Word Cloud below, which depicts key sentiments analyzed from 7,400 Spanish verbatims:

On Foreign policy
Mitt Romney: ‘No creo en Europa, creo en América’ Tonto es el que dice tonterías, Romney. source

Translation: Mitt Romney: ‘I don’t believe in Europe, I believe in America.’ He who utters silliness is himself silly.

On Immigration
_¡Que Se Vayan Los Demonios De Nuestro Pueblo!
Hay grandes peligros: el candidato principal republicano que podría llegar a ser el próximo presidente es Mitt Romney._ source

Translation: Get Rid of Our Country’s Demons!
There are great dangers: Mitt Romney is the leading Republican presidential candidate and could become the next President.

On Drug Wars
“Es tiempo de que Estados Unidos asuma la responsabilidad por el dolor y el sufrimiento y la tortura y los asesinatos que ocurren a lo largo de América Latina”, aseguró Mitt Romney. source

Translation: “It’s time for the United States to take responsibility for the pain and suffering and the torture an assassinations happening throughout Latin America,” asserted Mitt Romney.

On Hispanic Issues
_Representante estatal Darren Soto y Freddy Balsera …
Mitt Romney está en el lado equivocado de cada asunto de importancia para los hispanos._

Translation: Mitt Romney is on the wrong side of every issue of importance to Hispanics.

On Same Sex Marriage
Mitt Romney ha garantizado que “defenderé las leyes que pretenden establecer el orden natural de las cosas y que garanticen el matrimonio como la relación entre un hombre y una mujer”. source

Translation: Mitt Romney has asserted “I will defend the laws intended to maintain the natural order of things and which uphold marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.”

On Tone of Rhetoric
Los choques entre Mitt Romney y Newt Gingrich han sido memorables; las cosas que se han dicho, de verdad asombrosas. source

Translation: The clashes between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have been noteworthy; the things they’ve said are astonishing.

On Shame
“Mitt Romney no tiene vergüenza”, dicen los narradores. source

Translation: “Mitt Romney has no shame,” say commentators.

On the Offensive
Romney intenta frenar el empuje de Gingrich y pasa a la ofensiva. source

Translation: Romney attempts to thwart Gingrich’s momentum and goes on the offensive.

On Risk
Mitt Romney está presentando la compaña de 2012 como un “juicio a la libre empresa”, definiendo a esta como la consecución de éxito a través de “trabajo duro y asunción de riesgo”. source

Translation: Mitt Romney is describing the 2012 campaign as “a free enterprice trial,” defending it as the culmination of success through “hard work and risk-taking.”

NetBase is more than effective in gathering emotional intelligence on the political front—with the sophistication to analyze natural language within its naturally occurring context and to gauge sentiment for any given timeline, from a single day to 12 months and with data refreshed every 5-10 minutes.

To demonstrate the wealth of Latino insights following President Obama’s State of the Union ( SOTU ) address on January 24th , we generated the Overview Word Cloud, which below reflects predominant Latino sentiment and is analyzed from a field of 12,000 posts within 72 hours.

While Romney’s word cloud reflected Latino emotion, the cloud for Obama’s SOTU is an overview of some very pragmatic issues: China, Iran, the U.S. middle class, immigration and labor reform, and tire imports.

As the GOP primary continues to unfold over the next nine months, we will continue to take the social temperature of Spanish-speaking Latino bloggers, by theme mapping the burning issues and tracking the passion index of the candidates.