Big Data Source for 2014 Election

Open Data Source for Election 2014 Open data are the data that can be freely redistributed and used by anyone for personal or research purpose. One of the examples of open data is a government data that contain tremendous resources. Moreover, the open government data can assist in making a better decision. By law, the government data should be opened to anybody. Thus, the political analysts and statisticians have taken the advantages of the open data to generate a big data for the U.S.

2014 senate election in order to predict the outcome of the election results. The purpose of this research is to investigate the role of big data for the analysis of the 2014 U.S. senate election. Since 2012, the big data has played a major role in the U.S. politics. In 2012, the Republican used the data analytics in winning the 2012 Presidential election by using the big data to predict the voter sentiments.

Despite the benefits that can be derive from big data analytics in predicting election results; the use of big data is still new. By consequent, no comprehensive research paper investigates the role of big data in predicting the U.S. election results. The research will attempt to fill the gap by providing a comprehensive research paper on the role of big data in the 2014 U.S. senate election.

Rationale of the Research The rationale of the research is to enhance a greater understanding of the policy makers, business community and academic community on the importance of the big data in forecasting the election results in the United States. Big data has played a tremendous role in providing analysis for the U.S. Senate 2014 election. For example, the Republican has turned data into votes using powerful GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software to create an accurate voter targeting.

The big data has also assisted in collecting detailed information of more than 250 million American voters. On September 3, 2014, the FiveThirtyEight used the big data to forecast the results of the 36 U.S. Senate elections, and it was forecasted that the Republican would have a 64% chance of winning majority seat in the Senate. Based on the data driven approach from the Big Data, it is revealed that data analytics play a bigger in understanding the voters' sentiment. (The Economist, 2014).

Woodie, (2014) argues that political scientists have been able to discover the strategy to predict the voter sentiments using the big data for their political advantages. In 2012, the President Obama was able to use the well-funded analytical data team to collect data on the entire American voters. (Scherer,2012). Using the fine-grained data, the Obama campaign team was able to predict the election results. For example, FiveThirtyEight.com used the analytical big data to correctly predict the outcome of the election.

Shen, (2013) supports this argument by pointing out that big data can provide sophisticated analytical tool that can assist Republican and Democrat to stay ahead of election campaigns. Moreover, the research will assist in enhancing a greater understanding on the strategy in using the socioeconomic and demographic data and voters' records to predict the probability of voters supporting Democratic or Republicans. Armed with the data, the advisers will be able to run experimental campaign and use the model to improve and refine the outcomes.

The research will also reveal how to use the big data in raising funds for election. Shen (2013) argues, "Big data and analytics played a critical role in fund raising. Fund-raisers were picked by number.