Using Social Listening to Understand Politics and Policies

Understanding voters is no longer just about focus groups and door-knocking. Social listening gives political strategists, researchers, and policy teams a continuous, real-time window into public attitudes, not by identifying individual voters, but by surfacing the big-picture shifts in how people think and feel about the issues that matter most.

We used Infegy Starscape to show how social listening can be an integral use for campaigns, policymakers, and researchers. In this Insights by Infegy, we'll walk through two core applications: tracking how cost-of-living concerns change over time, and identifying the distinct audience personas surrounding a major 2028 presidential contender.

Tracking Changes in Attitudes

Policies don't exist in a vacuum. They're shaped by public sentiment. Social listening lets us chart how concern about specific issues changes over time, often revealing cause-and-effect relationships that traditional polling misses entirely.

Case Study: Cost of Living in America

We analyzed negative post volume across six cost-of-living categories: electricity, healthcare, housing, food, gas, and caregiving, from March 2023 through March 2026. The results tell a clear story.

Figure 1: Negative post volume share of voice for major factors in the cost of living, (March 2023 - March 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Housing remains the undisputed top concern for Americans across the three year timespan. However, if we look at the trends we see over time these factors can shift in their importance.

Figure 2: Negative post volume over time for major factors in the cost of living, (March 2023 - March 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

As we can see, the overall order of housing, healthcare, and food remain the top concerns for almost the full time period, until March 2026 when gas prices surge above healthcare and food. For those in the political space, this is noteworthy as it suggests voters and constituents are highly concerned with the increasing cost of gas due to the war in Iran.

For a policy team or campaign, this kind of trend chart isn't just interesting. It's actionable. It tells you when to lead with a message about energy independence or moving away from fossil fuels, and also housing affordability is still the issue that's going to land.

Identifying Audiences Around a 2028 Contender

Beyond issue tracking, Starscape's Personas widget lets teams understand exactly who is talking about a candidate, and how they feel. Using this tool, we mapped the audience landscape around Pete Buttigieg, a widely discussed potential 2028 presidential contender.

What emerges is a nuanced picture: not a monolithic base, but a set of distinct audiences with different levels of enthusiasm, different concerns, and very different potential for persuasion.

Social listening personas are built from public online conversations at scale. They describe audience clusters rather than individuals. The goal is strategic insight, not voter profiling.

The most fervent advocates in the dataset are a tight-knit online community with exceptional positivity ratings and deep institutional knowledge of Buttigieg's campaigns and messaging. They are a male-dominated group and highly engaged with political conversation.

Figure 3: Starscape Personas widget output for audiences around Pete Buttigieg, (March 2016 - March 2026); Infegy Social Dataset.

However, a much larger group exists, the Pro-Democracy Progressive. This group is defined by alignment with broader progressive and Democratic values rather than Buttigieg specifically. They see him as a credible figure within their political sphere, and seem like a good audience to position to as the 2028 campaign moves ahead.

Figure 4: Starscape Personas widget output for audiences around Pete Buttigieg, (March 2016 - March 2026); Infegy Social Dataset.

As an openly gay politician, Buttigieg draws significant engagement from LGBTQ+ audiences, but the relationship is complex. Positivity is above average but not overwhelming, reflecting a diversity of views within the community itself. This audience feel like there is a lack of progressivism in his policy positions.

Figure 5: Starscape Personas widget output for audiences around Pete Buttigieg, (March 2016 - March 2026); Infegy Social Dataset.

Former military members engage with Buttigieg's profile, but sentiment is the more negative of the more pro-Buttigieg audiences we analyzed. Despite sharing a service background with the candidate, political ideology, often conservative, overrides that commonality.

Figure 6: Starscape Personas widget output for audiences around Pete Buttigieg, (March 2016 - March 2026); Infegy Social Dataset.

What This Means for Campaigns and Policy Teams

Taken together, these two examples illustrate what makes social listening genuinely powerful for political work. It's not about tracking specific people, it's about understanding the shape of public opinion and where it's heading.

On the policy side, the cost-of-living data makes clear that housing anxiety is structural and persistent, while gas prices can create sudden, politically significant spikes in negative sentiment. A campaign that only tracks traditional polling would have missed the speed and scale of the March 2026 gas reaction.

On the audience side, Starscape's Personas reveal something that polling typically obscures: the gap between a candidate's base and their potential coalition. Buttigieg's ardent supporters are a small, loud, highly committed group. But the Pro-Democracy Progressive audience is nearly five times as large, and measurably persuadable. That's where campaigns should be spending their time and resources.

Social listening, done right with tools like Infegy Starscape, gives campaigns and policy teams the intelligence to act on exactly that insight, in real time, at scale, and with far more nuance than any single poll can deliver.

For a demo of the power that Infegy Starscape can provide you, please schedule a demo with our team.