Let’s Get Ready to Tweet! An Analysis of Twitter Use by 2018 Senate Candidates

Abstract

To what extent did the 2018 Senate candidates adapt their Twitter strategy to match electoral realities during the campaign? Previous literature on the political use of social media suggests that Twitter is a gauge of “word of mouth” popularity and can be seen as an indirect proxy for votes. As such, Senate candidates have an incentive to be strategic in their use of social media during the election season. Relying on the framework set forth by Gainous and Wagner (2014), we categorized senatorial candidates’ tweets using an Artificial Neural Network and analyzed them over time to see if political party, presidential vote margin, incumbency and Senate race competitiveness predict the types of tweets that candidates were likely to send. Senate candidate tweets were also examined to determine under what conditions candidates opted to attack, stay quiet about, or align themselves with President Trump. We found that incumbents tended to talk about policy more and attack less, while challengers attacked their opponents to level the playing field. Democratic candidates followed a conventional strategy of tweeting about Trump where it made strategic sense, and using social media in competitive races to attack their opponents and to encourage supporters to get involved. Republicans followed a base-mobilization strategy consisting of aligning themselves with Trump and attacking their opponents when they were underdogs.