Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data: Emotions Revealed Regarding Donald Trump during the 2015-16 Primary Debates

Twitter plays a vital role in spreading information and influencing people's opinions in a specific direction. As an easy-to-use platform, Twitter motivates people to share their thoughts and express their opinions. It has been shown by researchers that tracking and analyzing public opinions from social media can help to predict certain political events. This has attracted the attention of politicians towards extracting public opinions regarding their strategies. Consequently, the sentiment analysis of political tweets becomes more valued over time. This study examines Twitter discussions about then-US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after his primary debates. It further investigates people's emotions regarding Trump after his debates to see if we can detect whether the tweets support or oppose the candidate. One of the key findings of this study is recognizing that negative or positive polarities in the tweets is not a good indicator to determine support for this candidate.