2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: When a web forum's members are overwhelmingly for Sanders, but the posts are about 50-50 [View all]athena
(4,187 posts)You can't just pull numbers out of the air based on your impressions. You have to actually do an unbiased analysis. You have to count every single post that was published in a given time frame, and categorize each post as pro-Bernie, pro-Hillary, or neutral. And you have to do this with enough posts and over a long enough time period to make sure your sample is statistically significant and representative of the overall trend. Ideally, you wouldn't do the measurement yourself but have an unbiased apolitical party do it to make sure you weren't biasing the results.
Quantitative analysis is hard. It's extremely difficult to remove bias from one's results, even when one is looking at something apparently impersonal like elementary particles. With something like politics, it's even more difficult.