Candidates Be Postin': Platform and Partisan Preferences in the 2022 US Midterms

• In Event: Elections, Campaigns, and Social Media Mobilization

Abstract

During modern-day elections, political campaigns leverage multiple social media platforms to engage with citizens (Aparaschivei, 2011), often to mobilize them. We conceptualize election mobilization by leveraging strategies traditionally used by political parties (Nedelmann, 1987) and social movements (Taylor & Whittier, 1992). While the most common form of mobilization studied has historically been voter turnout (e.g., Cameron, 1974; Schraff, 2014), citizens can be mobilized to encourage a variety of political acts, including participating in rallies (Wells et al., 2020) and donating to a campaign (Heersink, Peterson & Peterson, 2021). However, because of platform affordances or a platform's user base, candidates may leverage different social media platforms to promote different forms of mobilization or discuss different topics on different platforms.

In this multi-platform, comparative study, we analyze social media messages from political candidates (N = 1,517) running for federal office during the 2022 U.S. Midterm elections to assess which platforms the campaigns used and how they used them differently. We leverage Ballotpedia’s Social Media links list, which consisted of 1,517 relevant candidates from 475 federal races during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and accounts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. We expand the list by manually searching for accounts on the alt-tech platforms (alternative technology) Truth Social, Getter, and Rumble, which are characterized by right-wing political users and content (Dehghan & Nagappa, 2022; Donovan, Lewsis & Friedberg, 2019; Peucker & Fisher, 2022; Siapera, 2023). We then collected all candidate posts on the platforms from October 1 to November 30, 2022, the pivotal month before and of the election. We further extracted text from Instagram image content and used automated transcription to produce Rumble and YouTube video transcripts.

With this unique dataset of social media posts (N = 309,883), we then apply computational dictionary methods (Muddiman, Stroud & McGregor, 2019) to identify messages that sought to mobilize voters online and offline to fundraise, vote, attend events, encourage engagement on social media, and visit other platforms. We also use validated dictionaries to label messages about four contentious domestic issues: LGBTQ+ issues, abortion, the culture war, and critical race theory. We use these labels to assess how politicians vary their mobilization strategies by chamber (House or Senate), platform, and political party around the midterm elections.

We find that no Democratic candidates in our dataset were on an alt-tech. In contrast, Democratic and Republican candidates both used mainstream platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube). We anticipated differences between candidates’ mobilization strategies based on their party. However, Democrats and Republicans alike were likely to share posts mobilizing votes or information about events and rallies. Instead, we find platform variations, wherein visual-based platforms (YouTube and Rumble) were used to mobilize around events, and other platforms were used for voting efforts. This finding highlights the need to study how candidates leverage video content to transfer offline events into online attention, extending the value of that event from a promotional standpoint.

Of the topics that we focused on in this study, both Democratic and Republican candidates were likely to mention the issues of abortion and critical race theory relative to LGBTQ+ issues and broader culture war debates. We attribute this finding mostly to the fact that the former two issues were more salient at the time of the election, given the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ongoing attacks on critical race theory, particularly in education (Harrison, Hurd, Brinegar, 2021).

Cumulatively, these results suggest that the use of a mobilization strategy or the focus on a topic is not only a function of the partisanship of a candidate or the office they seek, but also the affordances of a social media platform. As candidates build larger and more multi-platformed social media campaigns, an externally valid study of their electoral mobilization strategy must consider multiple social media platforms. This scope can pose a challenge to political communication scholars, as platform lifespans can vary (Facebook started in 2004 and still exists today, but the platform Vine lasted a mere four years). However, multi-platform studies can also reveal important similarities across platforms (for example, video-based platforms to share information about events and rallies).

Authors

• Maggie Macdonald, University of Kentucky

• Megan Brown, University of Michigan

• Josephine Lukito, University of Texas at Austin

• WEI ZHONG, New York University

• Ross Dahlke, Stanford University

• Jason Greenfield, New York University

• Yunkang Yang

• Bin Chen, University of Texas at Austin