After poring over 460,000 tweets from 687 candidates who ran for national office and governorships in the 2010 midterm election, University of Michigan researchers have concluded that conservative candidates (who made significant political gains last fall) made more extensive and coherent use of Twitter than their opponents.The research team gathered and analyzed the language used in three and half years worth of candidates’ tweets leading up to the election–including crawling the content of 233,000 outgoing links mentioned in the tweets. They found that Republican candidates tended to focus more narrowly on economic messages.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=109061