My book manuscript is called Congressional Campaigns on Social Media: Posting for their Audiences.

Summary:

On its face, if you were to make a pros and cons list for using Twitter (now called X) for your congressional campaign, the cons appear to outweigh the pros. Twitter is in a state of flux. As ‘regular’ users have left Twitter in droves since Elon Musk bought the platform in fall 2022, the politicians remain. Despite plummeting use of Twitter by regular users, all members of Congress have maintained accounts on the platform for several years, as have almost all non-incumbents of any quality, both Democrats and Republicans. Why do the politicians stay on a platform that their voters have largely vacated? Why did they make frequent use of a platform, tweeting millions of times per campaign cycle, that at its height in 2018 only had about 24% of Americans using it regularly (compared to Facebook at 70% or YouTube at over 80%, Pew Research Center 2024)? In Congressional Campaigns on Social Media, I provide an explanation for these historical trends and our current reality: Twitter offers congressional campaigns an affordance, or feature, not provided by any other single social media platform, that makes it too costly to leave. Unlike other sites, Twitter provides a space to reach multiple elite audiences simultaneously and through these elites to reach donors nationwide. While a new social media platform or other communication tool may offer this valuable feature in the future, for now Twitter continues to be the single best venue for political elites to reach multiple audiences in a single place. Knowing which audiences consume campaign communications is important for our ability to describe what was said, but is essential to assess whether or not a message was successful. As we try to understand the ubiquitous use of social media in modern politics, I offer a window into how political elites use Twitter and why it matters for them.

I deviate from most of the scholarship on congressional campaigns on Twitter by testing rather than assuming that voters are one of, if not the, main audience for politicians on the platform. I test this premise by using a best-case test. In 2018, three months before primary election day, the US house districts in Pennsylvania underwent an off-cycle redistricting. If politicians were using their tweets to communicate directly to their voters, we should expect to see changes in tweet content for the candidates that experienced a change in district partisanship following the sudden shock of the new district boundaries. However, I do not find any evidence that campaigns changed their tweet messaging, even if they experienced a substantial change in district partisanship.

In Congressional Campaigns on Social Media I show that, rather than communicating directly to their constituents, congressional campaigns use Twitter to simultaneously reach several elite audiences through their tweets: (1) out of district voters who can't vote for a candidate but can donate; the (2) media, (3) other politicians; and (4) interest groups. The presence of multiple elite audiences on Twitter is unique from any other other single communication tool online or offline such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, emails, speeches, press releases, or television advertisements.

My theoretical expectations are informed by interviews that I conducted with primary challengers and staff from ten 2018 primary campaigns for the US House. I interviewed both Democrats and Republicans, running in safe and competitive seats, from across the country. The campaigns represented varying levels of electoral success-- some performed poorly in their primary, others were victorious. Insights that I gained from these interviews include the competing considerations of focusing on national vs. local issues and their genuine uncertainty that anyone was paying attention to them. When I asked if they believed that their tweets reach and persuade voters, all participants laughed out loud. The anecdotes shared with me by the campaigns informed the decisions that I made in my data collection and quantitative analyses. They also provide important context to the actual decisions made about social media use by congressional campaigns. I pair these insights with over 9 million tweets (all tweets by major party primary candidates who ran for the US House in 2018, 2020, and 2022), detailed information about the candidates' friends and followers on Twitter, and the tweets by several types of political elites (interest groups, the media, and other party leaders). Leveraging these data, I show the ability of congressional primary campaigns to use their tweets to reach several audiences through a single platform and receive real-world benefits from doing so. By combining multiple big data sources and elite interviews, I am able to test and confirm my theory in rich ways with granular data. It also allows me to examine the behavior of incumbents and non-incumbents as they compete in congressional elections.

Not only can many campaigns reach nationwide and elite audiences through their tweets, they engage with them on the platform, form online relationships, and are able to fundraise in ways they could not without Twitter. By not carefully considering who the audience is for a piece of campaign communication, and recognizing that voters may not be the only audience, current scholarship at best offers an incomplete view of what politicians do and why. At worst, it hinders our understanding of the implications of their actions. While this is true of any speech, website, press release, or TikTok video, for any type of political elite or organization, it is particularly necessary on Twitter where several audiences are present. Even before Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, congressional candidates and members did not reach many of their voters through Twitter, and they knew it. They tweet, instead, to reach a different set of audiences.

I find that congressional campaigns cater their tweets for multiple elite audiences, and that for most campaigns voters in their district are not one of them. I demonstrate that most of a campaign's Twitter followers are not in their state, let alone in their district. Rather than using Twitter as a way to communicate to their constituents and win votes, politicians use their tweets to (1) build relationships with other elites on-platform and build political capital, (2) gain media attention, and (3) fundraise. Importantly, my results suggest that these benefits are \textit{not} limited to incumbents or even House and party leadership. Rather, non-incumbents and less senior rank-and-file members of the House are able to leverage their tweets and experience to gain attention and benefits.