Fear and Loathing on Twitter: Exploring Negative Rhetoric in Tweets During the 2018 Midterm Election
This chapter contributes to research on the strategic use of emotions in political campaigns by gauging the presence of negative rhetoric in the social media posts of congressional candidates. Leveraging a dataset of tweets posted by candidates for the U.
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Fear and Loathing on Twitter: Exploring Negative Rhetoric in Tweets During the 2018 Midterm Election Bryan T. Gervais, Heather K. Evans, and Annelise Russell
In the 2018 midterm elections, fear and negativity were prominent themes both in traditional media coverage and online. In the days leading up to the election, President Donald Trump regularly took to the media to warn Americans of the sheer number of noncitizens marching toward our southern border. The Republican Party also painted the Democrats as the party of “open borders,” suggesting that by electing them we would have B. T. Gervais (*) Department of Political Science and Geography, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] H. K. Evans Department of Political Science, University of Virginia’s College of Wise, Wise, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Russell Martin School for Public Policy and Public Administration, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Foreman et al. (eds.), The Roads to Congress 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19819-0_3
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an increase in violent crime. It is unclear, however, if Republicans running for congressional seats were following suit by using fearful and anxious language on Twitter. How do congressional candidates use Twitter during elections, and specifically, how did they use the platform during the 2018 midterms? Political scientists started unpacking what was being said by congressional candidates on social media starting with the 2010 midterm election, by collecting and analyzing the posts and tweets from campaign and official accounts.1 Some of the early work in this area pointed out that not all politicians were engaging in similar ways, particularly on an untested and novel media platform like Twitter. Partisanship, gender, and competitiveness mattered. Early work showed that those who were in the “out-party” (those who were not currently holding a majority in Congress) were more likely to tweet and go negative about their opponents than those in power.2 On Twitter, out-party members do not have to contend with majority- controlled agendas—political power is no barrier to agenda control and communication. Some work on Twitter and campaigning has suggested that the way candidates tweet can affect whether they win, or at least there are correlations present between the way that candidates use social media and whether they win their elections. Early work finds that the winners of U.S. House elections are more likely to use Twitter3 and are less likely to go negative.4 Winners may be less likely to go negative for the simple reason that winners tend to be incumbents, and incumbents are less likely to go negative than challengers. The findings regarding Twitter and going negative should not surprise us. On the campaign trail, politicians use a range of emotional rhetoric to reach voters. Emotions in campaigns are prevalent because they can be connected to vote choice,5 policy perception
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