Pew Looks at How Candidates for Office in the US Have Used Twitter This Year

Pew Research Center analyzed more than 3.4 million tweets by over 7,500 candidates for federal, state and local office since the year began and shared its findings in the run-up to the midterms elections next week. Computational social scientists Samuel Bestvater and Sono Shah wrote in a blog post, “As Election Day draws closer, candidates for office at the federal, state and local level are competing for the support of the voting public both online and off.” The think tank found that: Candidate tweets mentioning abortion, the economy, education or race accounted for just 20% or so of the tweets analyzed, despite the highest average weekly ranking during the study period. More than three-quarters of the candidates tweeted at least once about all four of those issues since the beginning of 2022.Democratic candidates were behind 55% of tweets on issues such as abortion and climate change, while Republican candidates produced nearly two-thirds of tweets about immigration, with the GOP hopefuls also focusing on foreign policy and taxation, at 43% apiece.Candidates from the two parties often use different terminology to discuss the same broad issue area, with Pew using race as an example and pointing out that Democrats use terms such as discrimination, equity and systemic racism, while Republicans use terms including critical race theory and woke. For the economy, Democrats tend to reference recovery and discuss inflation with terms including corporate greed and price gouging, while Republicans turn to phrases such as “Bidenflation,” crushing and skyrocketing.One-third of tweets from Republican candidates used negative language, compared with 25% from Democrats, and the GOP hopefuls were most likely to use negative terms when discussing immigration (54% of tweets were negative in tone), the economy (53%), the pandemic (51%), climate policy (46%) and LGBTQ+ issues (45%).Tweets on topics like the economy and immigration have been relative consistent over the time period studied by Pew, while specific events caused spikes for other topics, such as the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade causing abortion to spike and the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, causing guns to spike. Democratic candidates tweeted about those issues at substantially higher rates than Republicans.Discussion of Covid-19 has basically ground to a halt, with 70,000 tweets mentioning it since Jan. 1, but 46% of those coming during the first three months of the year. The pandemic was mentioned in just under 11,000 tweets between Sept. 1 and Oct. 24.The volume of tweets with candidates mentioning the opposing party rose to nearly 10,000 per week in October from approximately 5,000 in the early stages of campaigning, with 95% of those tweets expressing disagreement. Republican candidates mentioned Democrats in 20% of their tweets, while Democrats mentioned Republicans in 11%.Roughly 4% of candidates’ tweets mentioned either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump, with Republicans far more likely to mention Biden.Democrats were about three times more likely to mention bipartisanship than Republicans, but it accounted for a tiny portion of the tweets analyzed by Pew, at 0.3% and 0.1%, respectively.Candidates in California focused on climate change, with 8% of total tweets from the state but 18% of tweets mentioning climate change or environmental issues. Likewise, Texas candidates were behind 10% of all tweets but nearly 20% of those that mentioned immigration.Nearly two-thirds of the tweets Pew analyzed did not mention any of the 16 issues the think tank examined, with Bestvater and Shah writing, “Much of this content appears to be less about discussing substantive issues and more about raising general support and awareness for the candidates and their campaigns.”