• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 9, 2016

Leveraging search algorithms, Microsoft's Bing Predicts forecast the Iowa Caucus winner. Typically the platform has a pretty good run rate when it comes to predicting the winner of live events. Bing predicted Trump would win in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. We now know what happened in Iowa. Trump lost to Cruz. Microsoft also predicted Clinton would win in Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada, losing New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders.

Search engines have become an entry point for many seeking information on the Web, so Microsoft engineers have built a platform that integrates Bing search data, along with social and other relevant data, to make intelligent predictions about upcoming events. Now the social listening platform Cision has jumped in with social data to explore predictions for the New Hampshire race.

Based on Cision's analysis of more than 45,000 tweets from New Hampshire residents between Feb. 3 and Feb. 6, the company's prediction is that Senator Bernie Sanders will win the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Cision bases its prediction on the fact that Sanders earned 56% of the Democrat share of voice in the data analyzed, versus Clinton's 44%.

The analysis excludes messages originating from the mainstream media and includes retweets and replies. All these messages are filtered to find mentions discussing specific candidates, including campaign hashtags, candidate names and slogans, to find the candidate who has the highest level of positive engagement before Tuesday's Primary vote.

On the Republican side, Cision predicts that Donald Trump will win the New Hampshire Republican Primary based on 30% of the GOP Share of Voice, followed by Senator Marco Rubio with 17%, Senator Ted Cruz earning nearly 14%, John Kasich with 12.4%, Jeb Bush with 11%, and Ben Carson with 5%.

Most public polls suggest New Hampshire voters could reshape the race for president Tuesday, and that Donald Trump is positioned to win the Republican primary, allowing the real estate mogul to rebound.

Still, more than four in 10 Republican primary voters in New Hampshire say they still could change their minds before the state's primary, reports ABC News. A CNN/WMUR/UNH poll shows less than half of Republican voters say they have "definitely decided" who they're going to vote for.

On the Democratic side, opinions have shifted during the last week, according to ABC News, citing UMass-Lowell polling in the state. Sanders led by as many as 33 percentage points earlier in the week, but that lead has dwindled to 16 points this morning.

Luck or Expertise? Last week, Cision predicted the Iowa Republican Caucus winner based on Twitter share of voice during the debate from Iowa residents. With 28% share of voice, Cision predicted Cruz the winner of the Iowa caucus.