Tweeting the Primaries
THE ECHO: Weekly Roundup of Political Discussion on Twitter (May 31–June 6, 2018)
Tuesday’s primaries brought comfort to Democrats in California who were concerned they might have been locked out of congressional races in November’s midterms. But what looked like a #BlueWave in late 2017 has settled into a much more competitive environment as the primary season begins to show its true colors.
Institutions
A big primary week drew increases in Twitter post volume related to U.S. national institutions. Tweets about the 2018 midterm elections were up 302 percent from the previous week on 834,170 related posts while, separately, the primaries in California attracted 173,581 tweets. With over a million tweets combined interest in the November midterms is building and will likely continue to spike over the next several primary elections.
Below is the Twitter volume for the political institutions we have been tracking since late last summer. You’ll note that President Trump continues to dominate and has sustained a relatively high three-week plateau of Twitter volume.
Here is a clearer view of Capitol Hill. You can see that the Senate continues to draw more tweets than the House, but there is a specific member who is an outlier I’ll highlight later in this post.
In light of Democrats somewhat unexpectedly being able to post a candidate for all November congressional elections as well as for governor, this week’s analysis of Twitter volume may tell a counter-intuitive story. Democrats were down one percent from last week, which is in striking contrast to tweets about the Republican Party, which were up 14 percent and attracted about a million more posts on the social media platform.
While Republicans maintain an edge on the metric, the gap has been almost closed since the beginning of the year. An alternative view is that this may not be a good thing for Democrats as we have found with incumbent candidates that increased volume is, at times, a reflection of high interest and political weakness.
It is possible there is still a third reason (among others) for this, which is the narrowing of the generic ballot from 14 percent to about 7 percent since January, according to RealClearPolitics.com.
Still, as you can see below, the gap has reopened since June 1 where Democrats held only a 3.5 percent edge. Is this a sign of the Blue Wave returning or noise in the data?
If we match this to our Twitter volume data, it suggests this is part of the answer. However, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken June 1–4 has Democrats +10 and Reuters/Ipsos has it at Democrats +11 so the potential for a Blue Wave may still be in play, if not consistently predicted.
Senate Races
Diving into the toss-up races, we find that Sen. Tina Smith (DFL-MN) may be challenging our impressions of what trending on Twitter might mean for incumbents. While down 27 percent from last week, she attracted the most buzz on the platform this week, finding ways to leverage her support for keeping families together when parents have been arrested or detained by immigration authorities as well as her primary victory.
Still, Smith is being challenged aggressively by Republican Richard Painter, who this week called her out for supporting sulfide mining so we’ll keep an eye on this race for more context.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was on the other side of a tweet by Donald Trump, Jr. this week, driving an over fivefold increase in Twitter volume for the embattled incumbent. After skating past a potential disaster of a candidate in Don Blankenship, Republicans are closing ranks against Manchin on the campaign trail and on Twitter.
House Races
Since we added Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA-48) to our tracking in March, he has averaged 10,892 related tweets per week, and has dominated the past three weeks among all toss-up incumbents in the Senate and the House.
Rohrabacher’s tweet volume is over three times the number of the next cohort, which includes endangered Republican incumbents Rep. Barbara Comstock (VA-10), Rep. Jason Lewis (MN-02), and Erik Paulsen (MN-03), all featured in our tip sheet, available on our PEORIA Project website.
The remaining 12 incumbents we’re tracking average fewer than 3,000 related tweets weekly as shown below.
Rep. Rohrabacher’s plurality victory in the California primary this week drew a supportive tweet from President Trump and a group called “Stump for Trump” tweeted out its support for Rep. Comstock. While Rohrabacher might enjoy presidential support his time, it’s likely that it made the Comstock team wince ahead of the Virginia primary on Tuesday.
Rohrabacher’s win with 30.4 percent of the vote this past Tuesday misses that he lost 16.1 percent to Republican Scott Baugh. It is questionable if those voting for Baugh are Republican voters who plan on voting in November for the controversial incumbent or if they might flip to Harley Rouda or Hans Kierstead, who are in a statistical tie for second place and ballots are still being counted.
Rep. Jeff Denham (CA-10) and Steve Knight (CA-25), incumbent Republicans in toss-up races we have been tracking, both look to be in better shape than Rohrabacher and have consistently drew much less attention on Twitter, including this week.
Bottom line: The Democrats retain an opportunity to take the House of Representatives back from Republicans but a giant #BlueWave is hard to see happening at this point in the campaign season.
“The ECHO” is a publication of The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM). It is funded by a donation by GSPM alumnus William H. Madaway and through a reduced-cost license to Crimson Hexagon. This edition covers political activity on Twitter in the United States May 10–16, 2018. All data from this post, as well as our methodology, is available on our PEORIA Project website and weekly by email (subscribe here). Also available on our website is the first two editions of The ECHO Quarterly, summarizing the key principles this research can teach campaigns and elected officials.
