We Don't Talk (Enough) About Audience (conferenced February 2026)

Some modes of campaign communication are obvious — a mailer goes to a specific address, a yard sign is seen by those who drive or walk by, and a television advertisement will be broadcast for a targeted media market. But the use of the Internet and social media have made the intended and actual audience of a campaign less obvious. An e-newsletter will go to whoever signs up, and any user can choose to follow a campaign on Facebook or Twitter. Today, a speech at a rally or a press release can be clipped and shared on social media for anybody to see. Communications are now talking to everyone, all at once, across multiple channels, yet the overwhelming assumption in the literature is that campaigns speak to their voters on all mediums. This book upends the conventional wisdom on elite communication, and why our understanding of campaign strategy, elections, and political communication is incomplete unless we examine how candidates use digital technology to appeal to journalists, other politicians, and donors. My conversations with those actually doing the posting make this clear. When asked whether their posts could persuade voters, the candidates and staff I interviewed laughed.

Understanding the intended audience of campaign communication is essential to explaining elite behavior and incentives. If we want to understand the consequences of a message, but the list of audiences that we believe are on the receiving end of that message is incomplete, then our understanding of the impact of that message will likewise be incomplete or incorrect. We Don't Talk (Enough) About Audience uses nearly nine million tweets from congressional primary campaigns to show that when politicians communicate, they aren't just talking to voters — they're talking to journalists, donors, and other candidates. Unlike other platforms, Twitter provides the ability to study a unique moment in time, across all candidates on a platform which allows leverage to answer important campaign audience questions about who may actually receive the message. I demonstrate that congressional primary campaigns can reach local and national journalists, interest groups, donors nationwide, and even one another through their tweets.

Broadly, this book calls for a reexamination of how political communication research thinks about audience. Politicians will keep adopting new platforms they can leverage for electoral success, but the question this book raises will outlast any single medium: who is actually on the other end of the message? Until we take audience as seriously as we take content, our theories of elite communication, representation, and even electoral strategy will keep mistaking who campaigns are performing for. We Don't Talk (Enough) About Audience offers a first, data-driven answer, and an invitation to ask the same question of every other channel — from press releases to TikTok — where elites speak, and we've assumed we know who's listening.