Do Sports and Politics Mix? Cross-Analysis of Fan Bases of Major League Sports and Presidential Candidates

Abstract: Considering the fact that sports and politics interact in a very complex way, this interdisciplinary area remains largely untouched in data science research. Given the fact that huge fan bases exist for the major sports leagues such as NBA and NFL, it would be important for us to understand the hidden relationship between sports fans and their political preferences, and how do these preferences affect their behaviors in supporting different candidates during the presidential election. Taking advantage of the rich user data from Twitter, we propose a new metric, Congressional Devotedness Score, to model candidate preferences more accurately. Using the proposed metric, a fine-grained analysis is conducted at sport-level, state-level, and team-level for fans with strong political affiliation. While some of the findings conform to previous studies and reports, we also offer newer insights and quantitative evidences for all the findings.