Pacman Vs. The Punisher

Any idle political talk concerning any Duterte-back candidate will inevitably be put up against Senator Pacquiao as the main contender. Using a year of social media data, AutoPolitic determines who is the stronger candidate for the theoretical presidential race.

We believe Senator Pacquiao is a stronger presidential candidate than anyone endorsed by President Duterte based on the following analysis; Senator Pacquiao arouses more emotions, tapes into deeper emotion, and is more positively perceived. President Duterte’s reactions are driven by negative media while having a strong sycophancy following also generated strong anger in the general public.

In terms of exposure, PRRD has 30% more posts due to his position and a dedicated office to promote the office and the issues, but suffering from a lower exposure, Pac man generated 50% more comments and nearly equal the shares, and has double the public’s emotional reaction. This indicates the public embraces Pacman despite having less exposure than the president. (Interestingly, Pacman has the most powerful social media president among all the Philippine senators. See HERE)

Deep diving into the public reaction, our first graph shows the general public’s anger level directed at the two figures, with PRRD showing both high and frequent levels of outrage, while Pacman rarely causes any anger. This is also consistent with our measurement of senators. The anger directed at PRRD will not benefit any PRRD endorsed candidate and will benefit Pacman.

The second diagram looks at the public adoration of the two figures. In the first variation, we see Pacman dominates the public adoration, while PRRD has a consistent base, it is nowhere near Pacman’s. When we overlay posts over the public adoration, we see the adoration for Pacman does not correlate with the number of posts, an indication of the deeper root adoration for Pacman that is trigger by posts but the deep emotions are not created or shaped by the posts.

Based on the data, and the iconographic analysis, we believe the general public treats Pacman as a cultural hero and the general public will judge any political achievement in terms of emotion, and in the context of Pacman’s achievement, whether the analogy is rational.

PRRD has a strong base and is seen as a leader of a special type of Filipino. While his supporters are vocal, energetic, and constant, it is also small and contracting.

In a straight-up head-to-head voting today, the number favors Pacman over PRRD. It would take much election engineering and campaigning for a PRRD surrogate to match PRRD’s performance, much much more to beat Pacman.

AutoPolitic’s data is provided by QSearch. Data range from 2020/8/05 to 2021/8/6. Total of 156,906,153 data points.

We use a one-year data timeline to measure the long-term, stable attitude of the general public. This is used to create a baseline that is free of the recency effect.