Written with David Mermin, Partner, Lake Research Partners
To better understand the results of the 2017 GA-06 District Special Election for Congress, we analyzed Twitter content mentioning the candidates, special election, or district posted from Friday, June 16, 2017 through the closing of the polls on Tuesday, June 20, 2017. This is a general keyword analysis covering the universe of tweets meeting our search criteria during this period. Our results follow.
What this analysis is (and is not) and a prelude to what we found
The analysis that follows is, by design, a broad sweep of all the activity on Twitter about the GA-06 Special Election. The tweets we analyzed include posts from national actors like the President and the news media. It also includes tweets from bots and zealous activists from both sides of the aisle from around the country. Other analyses indicate that bots comprised double-digit percent of the total tweets about the election, with the highest rates occurring within the core election conversations on the key campaign-related hashtags. This large body of tweets has the potential to influence the views and behavior of voters in the district.
The complement to the broad analysis presented here would be to analyze the tweets of a sample of registered voters within the district. This would allow us to see which of the viewpoints we see below in the general analysis are getting traction among real people who can vote. But more than this, by analyzing the tweets of registered voters in the district, we would be able to see how they talk about issues across all their tweets, not just within tweets mentioning the GA-06 election and candidates, providing us with deeper insights into what voters are thinking that what we can see here.
Before diving into what we found, what was missing from the tweets we analyzed was strong references to a positive message for Jon Ossoff. There was a lot of process oriented references, focused around hashtags like “#voteyourossoff” and “#flipthe6th,” but we did not find much about Ossoff’s policy ideas for growing tech jobs and government accountability. And while Ossoff’s efforts to push Handel’s negatives on Planned Parenthood and LGBTQ couples’ right to adopt found traction, there was little reference to the impact a vote for Handel would directly affect people in the district. Without that, there was no effective counter to the negative impact her supporters were saying about electing Ossoff.
By driving harder on social media about the reasons to vote for Ossoff, including positive messages about his policy agenda and negative messages about the direct impact Handel’s election would have on the district, the Ossoff campaign could have shifted the focus of the conversation on Twitter (and social media, generally, given Twitter’s agenda setting powers) to more compelling reasons to vote for him. And social media content research would be able to pick up this shift as it was happening.
Campaigns need to use social media to identify the issues and perspectives that matter to the voters with good content research, but then they need to seize the conversation to change the focus of what is being discussed there towards the issues and messages survey and focus group research show will help them win. Marketing policy ideas and tapping into voters’ emotions by highlighting what the election results will mean to them will be far more effective at moving votes. Campaigns rightly do a lot of essential research to identify the most effective way to message candidates’ priorities to the voters, but without a comparable effort to drive these messages into the conversation by engaging people on social media with them, the conversation will not move as much as it should to affect the votes.
Polling Context
During the period of this analysis, opinion polls documented a shift from Ossoff to Handel after June 15.
Table 1. June polls for GA-06 race
Trump jumps into campaign via Twitter
@realDonaldTrump inserted himself into the GA-06 election on two occasions. On April 17, Trump engaged the first round of voting, raising the issue that Ossoff lived outside of the district, as well as calling him weak on crime and illegal immigration, bad for jobs and for higher taxes. After the first-round vote, Trump characterized Ossoff’s plurality as “Dems” “failings” and “Hollywood vs. Georgia on June 20th.”
Trump was silent about Georgia from April 20 until June 19. With two tweets on June 19 and two early on June 20, Trump focused attention on Ossoff’s inability to vote for himself because he lives outside of the district, his softness on crime and security, and for raising “taxes to the highest level.” Following his attacks on Ossoff, the last of Trump’s four tweets was a pure positive endorsement and call to get out and vote for Handel. His tweets generated over 78,000 retweets, over 284,000 hearts (favorites) and over 57,000 replies. The replies contained many negative responses, but were clearly overshadowed by Trump’s retweets and hearts.
Figure 1: @realDonaldTrump tweets in last 48 hours before GA-06 polls closed
What people were saying about Jon Ossoff, Handel & the GA-06 special election
Tweets about the GA-06 Special Election Day grew steadily throughout June as the June 20 election day approached, holding at a few thousand a day throughout most of the month, quickly rising to around 250,000 on June 19 and nearly 750,000 on election day. Much of this activity, we have learned, was generated by a cluster of accounts tied to Robert Shelton, an entrepreneurial Trump supporter. All of it was part of the at-large Twitter conversation (Note: This analysis does not analyze tweets of only registered voters in GA-06, but that analysis will add significant insights). All told, we identified 2,788,548 tweets about the GA-06 Special Election from June 1st to the closing of the polls on June 20th.
We generated word clouds for three segments of the month, June 1-14, up until the baseball practice shooting; June 14-18; and June 19-20, when Trump engaged via Twitter.
In the early part of the month tweets about living/livable wage and LGBTQ rights are prominent, among more general rally tweets for both Ossoff and Handel.
Figure 2. Word cloud for tweets before GOP baseball practice shooting & example tweets (June 1-4, 2017)
For the first few days after the baseball practice shooting on June 14, we see an increase in tweets about LGBTQ rights, focusing in on Handel’s comments regarding same sex couples adopting children. But we do not see prominent mentions of the shooting. By Monday morning (June 19), tweets about LGBTQ rights were replaced by tweets referring to Rep. Scalise being shot and IE, pro-Handel ads that took Obama comments out of context and implied a connection between Ossoff and the baseball practice shooting.
Figure 3. Word cloud for tweets before @realDonaldTrump engages & example tweet (June 14-18, 2017)
In the final days of the campaign (June 19-20), Trump jumped into the Twitter conversation, resurfacing the point that Ossoff could not vote for himself because he lived outside the district. We also saw increased focus on the Scalise shooting and a continued focus on the comments by Handel about gay parents tweeted by @Funder (Scott Dworkin) and retweeted by @SarahKSilverman.
Figure 4. Word cloud for tweets after @realDonaldTrump engages & example tweet (June 19-20, 2017)
Last minute themes
GOP attempts to tie Ossoff to Nancy Pelosi accelerated June 19 and 20th. Tweets mentioning her in the context of the election jumped from less than a thousand a day throughout the month to over 5,000 on June 19 and well over 10,000 on June 20.
Figure 4. Word cloud for tweets after @realDonaldTrump engages & example tweet (June 19-20, 2017)
By comparison, references to “al Jazeera” and the GA-06 election jumped to only about 600 tweets on election day.
Figure 6. Twitter activity mentioning “al Jazeera” and the GA-06 election & example tweets (June 1-20, 2017)
Among the tweets mentioning the GA-06 election, we also see a big spike in mentions of Rep. Scalise on June 19 (~9,500 mentions), though mentions dropped by more than half on June 20 (~3,700 mentions).
Figure 7. Twitter activity mentioning “Scalise” and the GA-06 election & example tweets (June 1-20, 2017)
There were also over 25,000 tweets in the last day about Ossoff not being able to vote for himself because he does not live in the district. This topic barely mentioned all month, until @realDonaldTrump tweeted it on June 19. Remembering that he also tweeted this just before the April GA-06 election, the issue completely disappeared from the Twitter conversation by the beginning of June. Then, with one tweet, Trump caused another large spike. Also, recalling that his tweet generated 19,000+ retweets, there were another 6,000 or so tweets on this topic generated by others.
Figure 8. Twitter activity mentioning “live in district” and the GA-06 election & example tweets (June 1-20, 2017)
Where do people get the information they share?
Mainstream media dominated the top sources shared by people tweeting about the GA-06 election. The exceptions were clearly further to the left (@HuffPost and former Jimmy Kimmel writer @dumbassgenius).
Figure 9. Top sources mentioned in tweets about the GA-06 Special Election (June 1-14,2017)
After the baseball practice shooting, @FoxNews worked itself into the Top 5 sources, but the Top 10 was still predominantly mainstream media, with a left comedian (this time @SarahKSilverman). Silverman retweeted with a comment the most popular tweet in the period, from @Funder (Scott Dworkin). Her tweet is included in Figure 10 (below).
Figure 10. Top sources mentioned in tweets about the GA-06 Special Election & example tweet (June 14-18,2017)
In the final day before and day of the vote (June 19-20), we see @realDonaldTrump demonstrate his power on Twitter. As in the previous periods, the Top 10 is dominated by mainstream media. But @realDonaldTrump jumped to number two on the list.
Figure 11. Top sources mentioned in tweets about the GA-06 Special Election (June 19-20,2017)
The steady dominance of mainstream media sources among the Top 10 sources raises an interesting question regarding Trump’s war on the media. Despite his attacks, these outlets continue to serve as pop
Just a Taste
This is just a taste of what social media content analysis can provide to campaigns. More to come.