We Don't Talk (Enough) About Audience

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. 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. I demonstrate that congressional primary campaigns can reach local and national journalists, interest groups, donors nationwide, and even one another through their tweets.

We Don't Talk (Enough) About Audience illuminates three key aspects of congressional campaign communication that we still have limited answers to — until now. First, we know very little about who campaigns are actually talking to when they tweet. This is one of the first books to test, rather than assume, the audience of elite communication. Despite a scholarly consensus that voters are the intended audience — 92% of articles that discuss audience name voters as the primary one — I find no evidence that campaigns change their posting behavior to reach them. As the candidates and staff I interviewed made clear, when asked whether their tweets could persuade voters, they laughed. Second, we know campaigns are active on social media, but the book takes the next step to identify who they are reaching instead and what they gain from it. Pairing nearly nine million tweets with interviews and data on campaigns' elite audiences, I show that journalists, interest groups, donors nationwide, and other politicians are the real audience for campaign communication — and that campaigns build relationships and raise money through these connections in ways they could not without Twitter. Third, these benefits are not the province of the powerful. Attention from elite audiences is not reserved for incumbents or party leadership; non-incumbents and junior rank-and-file members are able to leverage their tweets to gain outsized attention and resources, suggesting that social media may be reshaping who can mount a serious campaign in the first place.