Twitter Sentiment Analysis and Political Approval Ratings for Situational Awareness

The rally around the flag effect is a political science concept used to explain increased, yet short-lived, popular support of a country's government or political leader(s) during periods of crisis such as wars. The effect is teased out through solicited public opinion surveys which reach a limited sub-sample of willing participants and are expensive to conduct, leading to a slow response rate and after-the-fact results that are more suitable for historical studies than for situational awareness or crisis management. On the other hand, on social media platforms such as Twitter, millions of users provide their unsolicited opinion on almost any topic, including politics. This paper aims to initiate the conversation around the question: Can social media be used to observe the rally around the flag effect in action as it occurs, and thus help increase situational awareness? This first study utilizes the Twitter social media platform as, at the time of this writing, Twitter is used for political discourse more frequently than other mainstream social media platforms. Furthermore, Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America was a staunch Twitter user who almost religiously used the platform for communicating to the public, more than and even some times in place of the regular established main stream media channels such as radio and television broadcasts and long standing processes such as white house press conferences and media releases. The study was conducted on tweets from the entire 4 years of Trump's presidency with a focus on the biggest crisis during his presidency: The COVID-19 global pandemic which lead to the only, and exceptionally short-lived, rally around the flag effect for his presidency. Ultimately, the study found that sentiment towards the president on Twitter did not mimic the nation's sentiment toward the president except for a brief moment during the peak of the rally around the flag effect; which is not enough for obtaining situational awareness nor for acting decisively in a timely manner that is in accordance with public sentiment. This result is to be expected, as while Twitter remains one of the dominate social media sites in the United States, it's users do not accurately reflect the demographics of the nation.