  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.
