Two Facebook researchers we recently profiled are back at it, crunching the numbers to come up with post-election data that raises questions about what role social networking might have played in the election.

While not yet complete and in need of more analysis, the early results from Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati's post-election study suggest how hard it is to pin down the ideology and tastes of Facebook users.

Using CNN election results together with their exit poll data for 23 governors' races and Facebook's tally of supporters for these same gubernatorial candidates, they discovered that discrepancies in voting trends exist among the public at large, 18-29 year-olds, and Facebook's candidate supporters.

actual vote average % Democrat = 49.5%

actual vote average % Republican = 45%

18-29 year olds average % Democrat = 55.0%

18-29 year olds average % Republican = 38.4%

Facebook supporters % for Democrat = 52.2%

Facebook supporters % for Republican = 39.9%

Conclusion: Facebook supporters are in between the actual vote and the

18-29 year old vote.

While Facebook supporters' tastes are different from other groups', Williams thinks Facebook users are in some ways like anyone else: they don't only respond to an ideology or a set of political platitudes, but also to those ineffable qualities that make us like or dislike candidates. As she told me, "Facebook supporters are responding to personal attributes- i.e., reacting to the profile content and to the emails from their Facebook friends, not simply the ideological bent of their age group or the actual political climate."

A look at the numbers for individual candidates is revealing but also raises important questions.

In Massachusetts, the actual percentage that voted for Deval Patrick was 56%; 66% of 18-29 year olds voted for him; and Facebook supporters were 80.9% for him.

Meanwhile, 12% of Texan voters voted for Kinky Friedman for Governor; 18% of 18-29 year-old Texans did; but 66.9% of Texan Facebook supporters did.

How do we interpret Patrick receiving 25% more support, and Friedman getting 55% more support, on Facebook than in the general population? Both candidates -- especially Friedman -- were outsiders that were likely to get a disproportional amount of support from Facebook users. And the national attention paid to Friedman, a bizarro candidate running an anti-establishment campaign, probably contributed to his popularity on Facebook, making it impossible to discern what percentage of supporters were Texans. His 80% is not an accurate guide of how Texan Facebookers voted.

It's difficult to say whether supporters on Facebook are adding up to anything substantial just yet. As the use of YouTube and video in general in this election has shown (Andy Carvin has a particularly convincing argument that the YouTubing of George Allen cost him the election), social media made an impact on the election, but so far it's tough to see what influence Facebook had on its own.

Tags: elections, Facebook, Youtube, Kinky Friedman, Deval Patrick

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