The most common feeling in Vox’s Election Day emotion tracker: “anxious"

At 7 o’clock this morning, we published Vox's Election Day emotion tracker, a way to share your emotions and see how others are feeling about the election. You can submit one emotion an hour and see how other readers are feeling, as well.

Twelve hours later, we’ve gotten 6,799 submissions about how our readers are feeling. The most popular emotion of them all? Anxiety.

Soo Oh / Vox

“Anxious” made up 24 percent of the emotions submitted to Vox. Then there's a very steep drop down to the next word, "excited," with about 7 percent of emotions.

To be sure, our readers are not representative of all voters or all Americans. But it’s a small window into how some people are feeling today.

I got some feedback that perhaps the accompanying text under the tracker primed you to feel anxious. But many Americans have been feeling a great deal of stress over the results of the election, independently of our tracker. Others thought that maybe the alphabetical list was skewing the results:

I admit I worried about this too, but I don't think I needed to. I designed and developed the tracker, and even I've been scrolling up and down the list every hour trying to find the word that best describes my mood. It's true that the top results are skewed a bit to the top of the list, but you can see "nervous," "proud," and "worried" pop up in the most frequent emotions as well.

You can track yours and other readers' emotions over at the emotion tracker now.

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