A Candidates Influential Use of Twitter during the 2018

Midterm Elections
By: Alexandra Bater and Madison MacKenzie

Abstract:

With the ever-changing political climate that exists today, it is evident that the role social

media holds in a political campaign is influential in the overall outcome. After studying the

direct influence social media exposure has on elections, the researchers determined to discover

their own correlation between politicians and their use of the Twitter platform. The researchers

found that Twitter is primarily used by Democratic candidates over Republican candidates. The

type of terms used by Democratic candidates mainly address key domestic issues, whereas,

Republican candidates use their Twitter outlet to discuss election cycle issues and their

opponent’s reputation.

Introduction:

There are a few topics that are often described as “Things NOT to talk about at the dinner

table”. The order is, but not limited to, religion, music, money and last, but not least politics.

Although politics has never been an easy subject to discuss, the current political state has

never faced this much opposition from the members of Congress, The Administration and the

people, themselves. In addition to the hostility running through the veins of Washington, after

one year in office, President Donald Trump has one of the lowest approval ratings to date at 39

percent (BBC, 2018).

With one of the most news-worthy elections behind us, it was time to analyze the

different aspects of this election and find how those elements may affect how politicians

campaign in future congressional and presidential elections.

 One of the largest increases within the political atmosphere during the election was the

communication, engagement and influential pressure all of the candidates had invested in

Twitter. With the immense incline of Twitter usage throughout the most recent political election,

the researchers were interested in further understanding the way politicians converse with their

audience, while simultaneously discussing topics, issues and policies that they intend to address

if elected into public office.

In order to discover how influential public officials engage with their following, the

researchers analyzed the Twitter feeds of 10 politicians from five critical states. The researchers

cross-referenced their Twitter feeds with key words, regarding domestic issues to further

understand the important topics of each politician, as well as, their overall tone on Twitter. By

analyzing the front runner in each state from both political parties, it was possible to compare the

sentiment, tone and values of each candidate running for Congress in the 2018 midterm

elections.

Literature Review:

Twitter Takeover

The growing influence of social media on society is undeniable; developing into a major

medium utilized by a diverse range of industries to engage with their consumers. Rated as the

third most used social media site, Twitter, with more than 300 million daily users, has attracted

professionals from public figures, public officials and journalists (Larson, 2).

Twitter, often considered a “micro-blogging” site, allows users to express opinions, in

140 characters or less, to their following (Larson, 2). Although many users download the social

media platform for personal use, to converse with friends and share viral memes, Twitter has

developed into a source for breaking news, a platform to track trending topics and has the ability
to keep all of their 300 million users up-to-date (Larson, 2). With such a variety of

responsibilities and vast popularity, Twitter holds transparent influence over society that impacts

our daily opinions and actions.

Twitter Influence

The classification of influence has a constantly changing definition and ability of measurement

due to our continuously growing advancements in technology. Influence is defined as “the power

or capability of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways” (Cha, 11).

While the traditional definition for influence allows for an open-ended interpretation,

measuring the influence that Twitter has on news-related sources and individuals can be gauged

by three different “interpersonal” activities on Twitter (Cha, 12).

Types of Interpersonal Activity

Following

Users interact with certain public figures by the act of following their Twitter accounts.

Retweeting

Users are able to pass along and share interesting pieces to their own followers from their

favorite accounts by the act of retweeting. Retweeting can be done by a few different

forms, either by “RT @username retweeting or via @username in a tweet,” (Cha, 12).

Mentioning

Mentioning is when a user can “respond to or comment on another persons’ tweet,”

(Cha,12).

These three types of Twitter activities correlate with different measures of influence from a user

on Twitter.

Measures of Influence:
Indegree Influence: When the number of followers a user has directly displays the audience

reach for a user (Cha, 12).

Retweet Influence: The ability a user has to create content that is worthy of sharing or virality,

which can be measured by the number of tweets containing the users Twitter account handle

name (Cha, 12).

Mention Influence: The ability a user has to directly engage in conversation on Twitter with

others, measured by the amount of handle name mentions (Cha, 12).

Twitter and Politics

Social media often holds a perceived correlation with fashion influencers, celebrities and

tech savvy millennials. Yet, many campaigns have built media-centered strategies around major

federal and state public official elections (Houng, 455).

It was discovered in the early days of television and mass media that news stories

influence the issues that society deems important and how advertisements are “especially

significant” towards influencing voters. By gathering that information, a general consensus was

developed that media “coverage and interpretation” plays a major role in elections, specifically

in elections for the President of the United States (Houng, 456). Therefore, with the immense

incline of social media popularity, it was hypothesized that social media would take the same

effect in an even faster, more influential manner (Houng, 456).

With new and old media working directly with one another, it was found that, when

traditional media, such as television or newspapers, mentions a politician, there would be a direct

increase in their mentions on Twitter. According to a study completed in 2012, discussing the

use of social media in the 2012 presidential election and its impact and candidate salience, it was

found “on average, a 10% incline in number of media mentions for a politician is associated with
4 to 6% increase in the number of mentions on Twitter,” proving a correlation between Twitter

and its influence on the public during major political campaigns (Houng, 459).

With traditional media and the new sphere of social media directly affecting one another,

the overall ability to influence society through media continues to grow stronger than originally

anticipated.

@theRealDonaldTrump

Despite the fact that Twitter was founded in 2006, Twitter did not make a dramatic

entrance into the political atmosphere until the 2016 presidential election, when, then Republican

nominee, Donald Trump utilized Twitter as his main outlet of information for his follower

audience, many of whom converted into major voters on November, 8th of 2016.

President Donald Trump, with almost 50 million followers (Trump, 2018), made

headlines, quite literally with 469 news stories included Donald Trump’s tweets within his first

100 days as President (Grieco, Pew Research Center), with his online Twitter presence. When

Donald Trump, “embodie[d] the inversion of the modern-era distinction between politics and

entertainment”, he successful drew in attention from many assets of the media community.

From the early stages of the Trump campaign, President Donald Trump rejected a

traditional sense of campaigning, by avoiding political professionalism in his messaging to

generally required practices (Wells, 700). Instead Trump benefited from provocative statements

that appealed to the non-traditional voters, labeling him the “outsider” candidate (Wells, 670).

Through his surprising appearance on social media, his actions controlled news stations

and papers, increasing his media mentions, resulting in a growing influence over voters. By

growing his popularity in traditional media, gaining almost two billion in “earned media, Trump
simultaneously embraced social media as a powerful tool to obtain national (and international)

attention (Wells, 671).

President Donald Trump’s consistent line of tweets were exposed to the largest political

audience any candidate had had on Twitter, automatically increasing his ‘indegree influence’.

Followed by an increase in ‘retweet’ and ‘mention influence’, the Trump followers dominated

the Twitter field by vocally supporting and defending, even his most eccentric tweets. The

number of Trump retweets that were produced were found “to have a significant positive

predictor of news stories”, showing a large success in courting the media’s overall attention

through efforts on his social media accounts (Wells, 675).

Sub-Tweeting Politicians: They’re Just Like Us!

Political debates between candidates are crucial to understanding policy and aligning personal

values to those running for public office. However, politicians often take “debates” off the stage

and into campaign advertisements, most commonly known as mudslinging.

Mudslinging, a political term that dates back to the 1828 presidential election between

Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, is defined by Merriam-Webster as when “one makes

malicious attacks, especially against political opponent” (DiBaco, Wall Street Journal).

Fast-forward to the 2016 presidential election and find that mudslinging is as prominent

today as it was in 1828, but now, with tools of mass communication, such as Twitter and other

forms of social media. Although Twitter was designed to have civil conversation, regarding

trends, ideas and even politics, it has shown that users, across private and public figures, cannot

seem to “converse” on much (Sanders, NPR).

 Although senior Twitter Manager, Bridget Coyne, believes Twitter provided everyone,

users and non-users, a political voice, it did not stop the malicious arguing that occurs from

voters to candidates, themselves (Sanders, NPR).

An altercation between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush provides an excellent example of

how mudslinging has creeped into social media.

On August, 10, 2015, during the primary stages of the

2016 presidential election, Democratic primary

candidate, Hillary Clinton tweets an infographic

about American student debt (Sanders, NPR).

Hillary Clinton’s

tweet was then

replied to by Republican primary candidate, Jeb Bush,

where the candidate created another version of the same

graphic, changing the text to combat her opinions and

solution on student debt (Sanders, NPR).

Even though these two original tweets are not too

terrible, the mudslinging ramped itself up when the

Clinton campaign replied with another infographic

and tweet, attacking the leadership of Jeb Bush

while holding office in Florida (Sanders, NPR).

 The Bush campagin responded to Clinton’s opinions on

his leadership with an attack on the Clinton presidential

campaign’s branding and policy.

With an increase in circulation via social media

sites, such as Twitter, mudslinging is able to gain greater

influence over society, today and in the future.

Research Question

With the political climate highly involving social media at its current state, the

researchers decided they wanted to explore the following research questions throughout their

study:

R1: Are politicans using Twitter to disucss key domestic issues to voters in the 2018 midterm

elections?

R2: Do politicans use Twitter as an outlet to smear their oppositing candidates campagin?

R3: Are politicans using Twitter more to discuss domestic issues or their individual campaign

agendas?

Methods:

To fill the gaps in research we are examining the topics that each candidate mentions on

their twitter account during a campaign cycle. We did a textual analysis of ten current candidates

running for the 2018 US Senate midterm elections. We conducted secondary research to discover

the top ten contentious Senate Races for 2018 and then chose five races from there in order to

have an attainable data set.

 The twitter pull was administered through the Advanced Twitter Search tool on the

Twitter website. The tweets were pulled from January 1, 2018 to February 28, 2018. Next, a

coding sheet was developed with twenty terms that were chosen to represent the top domestic

issues facing voters today. This includes terms such as guns, economy, workers, racism, schools,

affordable, jobs, premiums, etc. After the coding was conducted for the first set of candidates

there had to be some changes made to the coding sheet. An extra seven terms were added to the

coding sheet that discusses party lines and campaign terms. It was made very clear by one

candidate that Twitter is used to smear their opponent. Once the additions were made a few

candidates were recoded and the rest of the accounts could be analyzed.

Findings:

These are the findings that emerged after analyzing a total of 1,503 tweets.

F1: The Democratic Candidates are tweeting about twice as much as the Republican

Candidates.

The five Democratic candidates tweeted a total of 952 times. The number of tweets per

candidate varies from the average of 190 tweets because of outliers Heidi Heitkamp, 311 tweets,

and Claire McCaskill, 54 tweets. The five Republican candidates tweeted a total of 551 times.

The average number of tweets per Republican candidates is 110 tweets which aligns with all the

candidates except outlier Josh Hawley, 56 tweets. The total number of tweets for the Democratic

candidates almost doubles the Republican candidate tweets. The higher number of tweets by the

Democrats can be interpreted that they place a higher weight on Twitter than the Republicans.

F2: The top used terms across all candidates are workers, opponent/name and jobs.
 As seen in Figure 1, the top three terms used in all the tweets was workers in 81 tweets,

opponent/name in 79 tweets and jobs in 68 tweets. Although these are the three top terms across

both parties, when broken down into mentions per party the data becomes more clear.

Figure 1: Total term usage by all candidates.

Of the 81 total worker mentions, 78 of them come from Democratic candidates leaving only

three mentions of workers by the Republican candidates. The second highest term, a mention of

a candidates opponent, is used a total of 79 times. The Republican candidates mention their

opponent 77 times compared to only two times by the Democratic candidates. The third highest

used term is jobs in 68 tweets and it has the most even distribution between the parties. But, is

still heavily skewed to the Democratic candidates. The Democratic candidates tallied up 52

tweets with jobs in it and the Republican candidates mention it in 16 total tweets.

As seen in Figure 2, the top three terms used by Democratic candidates was workers in

78 tweets, jobs in 52 tweets and economy in 24 tweets. When comparing the top terms amongst
all candidates with the top terms by the Democrats, two out of the three are the same. This can

also be correlated to the larger amount of tweets by the democratic candidates.

Figure 2: Terms usage by the democratic candidates.

As seen in Figure 3, the top three terms used by the Republican candidates are

opponent/name in 77 tweets, campaign in 29 tweets and Republican in 27 tweets. The difference

between the most used term and the second most used term is 48 mentions. That is a very large

difference and makes serious implications for what the Republican candidates use Twitter for. A

mention of the candidates opponents takes up about 14 percent of the Republicans total tweets.

Another 5 percent is the mention of their own party. The Republican candidates are using Twitter

to discredit their opponents, unlike the Democratic candidates who are using it to discuss

domestic issues.
 Figure 3: Term usage by the republican candidates.

F3: The Democratic candidates are using Twitter to discuss the issues while Republican

candidates are using it to target their opponents.

Before analyzing the tweets, secondary research was conducted to find out what the top

five domestic issues facing voters in American are. It was determined the top five issues were

education, job market, gun violence, healthcare and race relations. From this, terms were

assigned to each category and then used to code the tweets. The domestic issue categories

referenced most by the Democratic candidates was the job market in a total of 154 tweets and

education in a total of 25 tweets. Figure 4 below shows the comparison of term usage between

the Democratic candidates and Republican candidates on these issues.

 Figure 4: The comparison between the democrats and republicans on specific term usage.

Meanwhile the number one issue mentioned by the republican candidates was not a domestic

issue, it was the issue of the election season. This is shown by the highest used terms being the

opponents names and the party name. The highest domestic issue the republican candidates

mentioned was the job market with a total of 30 tweets. This breakdown of the republican

candidate tweets explains their engagement on Twitter.

F4: The candidates that mirrored the findings the most for each party were Senator Tammy

Baldwin for the democrats and Kevin Nicholson for the republicans.

When each candidate is analyzed there is one per party that was most representative of

the findings of each group as a whole. For the Democratic candidates, it is Senator Tammy
Baldwin from Wisconsin. She is not only very active on Twitter with 233 total tweets, she is

tweeting most about the domestic issues. Senator Baldwin was the highest tweeter about the job

market issue. She tweeted about workers 40 times, the economy 12 times and jobs 9 times. That

is a total of 61 tweets mentioning a term connected to the job market. That accounts for 26

percent of her total tweets. She also has a few mentions for the other domestic issues referring to

gun violence, health care and education. Plus, she matched the other Democratic candidates with

the things she was not mentioning. On the election issue she only had five total mentions. That

puts her percentage of mentions of election terms or party lines at only 2 percent of her total

tweets. These findings place Senator Baldwin as the ideal example for how a democratic

candidate should use Twitter.

For the republican candidates Kevin Nicholson had the most similar data results to the

whole group. He tweeted a total of 114 times which is right on par with the 110 tweet average.

He barely mentioned domestic issues but the one referenced most, only twice, was the job

market. The majority of his tweets fit into the election issue category. Nicholson referenced his

opponent a total of 40 times. This adds up to about 35 percent of all tweets posted by Nicholson

were not about himself or his policies, they were about discrediting his opponent. The second

highest used term was Republican at 14 times and a total of 12 percent of all tweets. The third

most used was campaign at a total of 8 times and about 7 percent of all tweets. This focus on the

election is a specific tactic for Twitter that all of the republican candidates seem to be on the

same page about.

Another interesting piece of data is that these two candidates are running against each

other. The race in Wisconsin is shaping up on Twitter to be a close battle by two candidates who
represent their respective parties well. The midterms in Wisconsin are shaping up to be a close

one.

Discussion:

After analyzing the twitter data, a few major claims can be made about the political use

of Twitter. The first is that Democratic candidates seem to be twice as active on Twitter than

Republican candidates. This is a very large margin of difference between candidates. It signifies

that the Democratic candidates place more value in having an active social media presence

compared to Republican candidates. This could be a result from the current President’s negative

perception of the media. Leading the Republican candidates to believe the best way to connect

with voters is not through social media. In the mind of the democratic candidates, Twitter is a

crucial part of connecting with all demographics and a new platform to voice their policies. This

could be a result from the positive impact social media had on both of Obama’s presidential

campaigns. This data supports the amount of power Democratic candidates give Twitter in their

ability to spread their messages and the lack of significance republican candidates give it by

using Twitter as a negative message board.

By analyzing the content of the individual tweets it is also clear that Democrats use their

accounts to discuss current issues facing the country while the republicans use it to attack their

opponents. The sheer number of tweets that encompassed the job market terms showed that the

Democratic candidates believe that is what their constituents want to hear about. A little over 16

percent of all tweets by the democratic candidates involved the job market. Now this may be

more prevalent because of the specific states analyzed, but a stable and successful job is a key for

every functioning member of society. The Democrats were making sure that voters were being

reassured that their jobs are important and will be protected. The top three terms by the
Democratic candidates were workers in 78 tweets, jobs in 52 tweets and economy in 24 tweets.

The ability to use the platform to discuss issues and their policies is how the democratic

candidates have chosen to use Twitter during an election cycle.

The Republican candidates took a very different approach. On the original coding sheet

the election cycle issue was not included. But very quickly it was understood that the

Republicans were using twitter in a very specific way. The data explains that the republican

candidates spend a majority of their time on Twitter attacking their opponents. The top three

terms used by the Republicans were opponent in 77 tweets, campaign in 29 tweets and

Republican in 27 tweets. Fourteen percent of all tweets used by the republican candidates only

aimed at discrediting or tearing down their opponents messages. Some even had hashtags that

accompanied the tweets to try and start a movement. This use of Twitter is possibly effective

depending on the base you are trying to appeal to. According to the Republicans, it is by far the

most effective way of using Twitter and is going to resonate with their constituents. The

reference of domestic issues was few and far between but when they did it was in also in

reference to the job market. There was only 30 tweets out of the 551 across all candidates that

referenced the job market. This shows that the Republicans are clearly using Twitter during an

election cycle for the purpose of degrading their opponent.

Limitations:

While conducting this study, the researchers faced a few limitations to would have

increased the overall margin of error within the experiment. First, when completing the coding,

all measurements were tracked by hand, amplifying human error.

 Secondly, while coding the terms for each politician, the researchers laid out a set of

terms to that were mined throughout Twitter feeds, however, it was unclear what variations of

those terms were counted throughout the mining experience.

Lastly, the time constraint on the research limited our collection period to two months,

whereas, if the time period were longer, the researchers would have been able to gather more

data, look at all candidates and address a variety of terms and issues that impact society.

Future Research

In regards to future studies, the researchers would be interested in analyzing these terms

until the end of the election cycle and finding a correlation between the outcome of the elections

and the terms used regularly on their Twitter account. Another research experiment that could

stem from the researcher’s current findings are is the types of engagement each tweet regarding

certain issues gains by the end of the election cycle.

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