Why Are The Button Down Republicans Still Beating The Cool Democrats At Social Media?

We did our first congressional twitter directory 3 years ago. It's amazing how many of them are no longer in Congress. In California alone, missing from action:

• @eltongallegly24
• @RepHowardBerman
• @RepLRichardson
• @RepJerryLewis
• @BacaCA43
• @MaryBonoMack
• @CongBobFilner

And every year there's a spate of articles about how the Republicans in Congress have more Twitter and Facebook followers than congressional Democrats. In 2010, there was an enthusiasm gap between fired up Republican GOP social media mavens and stuffy old Democrats. HeadCount pointed out back then that "Republicans have about four times as many Facebook fans as their Democratic counterparts, and five times as many Twitter followers. It’s a social media landslide… In 22 out of 37 Senatorial races, the Republican candidate has a larger social media presence than his or her Democratic opponent across both Facebook and Twitter. The Democrat has a larger presence in nine races, and in six races the lead is split." And 4 years later, we're hearing much the same story.

• Republicans have more followers than Democrats

The median Republican House member has 6,872 Twitter followers, while the median Democrat has 6,015, a difference of about 13 percent. Republican Senators enjoy an even wider advantage-- 23,252 followers versus 19,429 for Democrats, a gap of 17.9 percent. Considering that Democrats hold a technological advantage over Republicans in many realms, these gaps are fairly surprising.

Democrats' efforts to maintain control of the Senate and continue treading water in the House will hinge largely on their ability to get out the vote, particularly among young and minority voters. The Pew Research Center notes that Twitter adoption levels "are particularly high among younger adults and African-Americans," so the fact that Republicans have the larger Twitter follower base represents a potentially serious deficit for the Democrats this fall.

All told, Democratic House and Senate members have a total of 5.5 million Twitter followers, compared to 7.2 million for the Republicans-- a deficit of 1.7 million followers, or 26.7 percent. In an era when razor-thin electoral victory margins are becoming increasingly common, this deficit matters.

• Republicans also follow more people on Twitter

The median Republican in Congress-- House and Senate-- follows about 100 more Twitter users than the median Democrat-- 613 versus 517. Following more people might mean that Republicans have a better sense not only of the national conversation on Twitter, but also of what their constituents are saying. This would give them an edge in crafting messages that their constituents care about.

• House Republicans tweet more than House Democrats, but Senate Democrats tweet the most

• Seven of the top 10 most-followed legislators are Republicans

The House

The Senate

Why should anyone care, right? Isn't Twitter like a toy or a game? Loaded question-- and no, it isn't. In 2012, AdWeek was already writing about how Twitter, used correctly, had the power to drive politicians' messages. Peter Greenberger, Twitter’s director of political ad sales in Washington, D.C., tells campaigns that they must “be committed to tweeting and working on the platform. Zac Moffatt, digital director of the 2012 Romney campaign, concurs.

“With the message, you have to make it timely and relevant,” Moffatt says. “If we put out a tweet, it can become the largest driver to our site, and it has become a huge point for us to engage with people.” That level of engagement comes with a price: Promoted trends run roughly $120,000 per day.

That’s hardly a bargain, but the payoff can be enormous. Besides its impact on messaging, Twitter is also becoming an important fundraising tool. “Twitter was a top eight referrer to the Gingrich campaign in terms of where money was being raised,” Harris reports. “For some of my other clients, it is an even more powerful fundraising tool than Facebook.”

And then there was the famous academic study last year by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen and Fabio Rojas on the new digital democracy asserting that "We no longer passively watch our leaders on television and register our opinions on Election Day. Modern politics happens when somebody comments on Twitter or links to a campaign through Facebook." They claimed that social media would put the polling industry out of business. That may take some time even if "new research in computer science, sociology and political science shows that data extracted from social media platforms yield accurate measurements of public opinion. It turns out that what people say on Twitter or Facebook is a very good indicator of how they will vote." They claim they were able to predict elections based on "tweet scores."

This finding is remarkable because it doesn’t depend on exactly what people say or who says it. We measured only the total discussion and estimated each candidate’s share. It is this relative level of discussion that matters for tracking public opinion in electoral contests. Furthermore, social media data mimic what polls measure. For example, in Ohio’s 3rd Congressional District, we found that Republican Mike Turner got 65.4 percent of his district’s tweet share. In the final election, he got 68.1 percent of the two-party vote. The tweet prediction was off by 2.7 percentage points-- a figure that is within the margin of error of any poll.

None of this, by the way, has anything to do with the lame Beltway Establishment strategy of buying phony Twitter followers to make it look like their pathetic hack candidates are popular.

In 2012 Romney had gotten extremely popular on Twitter in a 24 hour period. In fact, he was being inundated with 25 new followers per second. How'd that happen? People hoping to learn how to break into the one percent? Not quite. His typical 3-4,000 per day increased some twenty fold to over 62,000 in a single day, according to TwitterCounter.com. But the new followers are highly suspect. From "empty" accounts to pornbots, spambots, Justin Beiber-related accounts, Obama supporters and foreign accounts, the followers tell a puzzling tale, suggesting spam automation, purchased traffic or perhaps even sabotage. And Gingrich received embarrassing national press when he had 1.3 million followers at a time no other GOP candidate even had 100,000 followers. A startling 90% were fake accounts. Around the same time, Limbaugh was exposed as it was discovered that New Delhi was the most popular source for "shares" on his "Rush Babes for America" Facebook promotion, suggesting he was outsourcing astroturf by paying experts in India to pad his traffic figures.