What are candidates in swing seats tweeting about?
Social media can make it simultaneously easy and impossible to know what elected officials are talking about.
Easy, because their communications are findable with a quick scroll or search. Impossible, because the amount of information makes it hard to parse.".
So we’ve tried to use the tweets of candidates in competitive races in aggregate to get a sense of how the 2022 midterms have been argued to date. We have some graphs and discussion below, and you can also get to the raw data on the top words here.
This is, of course, not the whole story of the elections and they’re not over yet. We’ll be posting daily updates on what swing seat candidates are saying on our Twitter feed. But we hope that it brings some clarity to the very messy world of political communications.
The data
First, let’s start with what we collected. We rounded up the most recent 1,000 tweets (or all tweets since January 1, 2022) from all accounts from candidates running for the House and Senate in seats that Cook Political Report has deemed as Likely, Lean, or Toss Up.
That gave us 148,636 tweets sent since January 1. We broke down the tweets by word, counted them by week and month, and used the NRC Emotion Lexicon to find the words that contained an emotional or sentiment component.
You can find the top words and how frequently they were used throughout the course of the campaign by each party here.
The results
One of the first things we looked at was which party uses a greater percentage of positive or negative words. You can see in the above chart that Democrats tend to use more positive words than Republicans.
You can ignore the big spike at the end which may be noise in the data and the relative positive vs. negative numbers are down to the dictionary of words we used to compare them. What these charts tell us is which party uses more or fewer positive / negative words and when the trends changed. As you can see, Democrats become more negative and less positive after the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs draft. Meanwhile, Republicans have become slowly less positive over the course of the summer.
We can also look into what type of emotions are connected with each party’s online vocabulary. For much of the year, Republicans used a higher percentage of words associated with anger and fear, except for after the Dobbs leak and around the final ruling. Democrats tended to have words more associated with joy and, most of the time, associated with trust.
What are the candidates talking about? You can dive into the data here to see a list of how the parties used the 1,000 most common words (and feel free to make your own charts as long as you cite us).
Some words that jumped out at us were:
Republicans were far more likely to mention Biden than Democrats were to mention Trump.
Republicans talked about Trump more than Democrats at the start of the year (while primaries were happening) but have trailed off in the last couple months as candidates moved towards the general elections.
Republicans have steadily talked about inflation and crime more as the year went on.
Democrats have talked about abortion much more since Dobbs than they did before, when they were roughly equivalent to Republicans on that issue.
Climate has been a bigger talking point than healthcare for Democrats.
There is much more to unpack. We encourage you to look at the data yourself or let us know what other questions you’d like explored to better understand the online debate running up to November 8.