Pew Study of More than 8,000 Candidate Twitter Accounts Shows Nearly Zero Mention of Bipartisanship

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Candidates running for office during this year’s midterm elections are tweeting a lot — but one topic that isn’t making it into their tweets is bipartisanship.

An analysis conducted by the Pew Research Center studied the tweets from more than 8,000 local, state, and federal candidates across the country. Since the beginning of 2022, those candidates have tweeted almost 3.4 million times, nearly 14,000 tweets per day in October, according to Pew.

“Mentions of bipartisanship are largely nonexistent on candidates’ Twitter accounts this year,” wrote Pew’s Sono Shah and Samuel Bestvater, and that was true for candidates from both parties.

According to the Pew study, Democratic candidates referenced bipartisanship in only 0.3 percent of tweets — and that was still three times as frequently as Republican candidates, who mentioned cooperating with people across the partisan aisle in only 0.1 percent of their tweets.

The most popular topics in candidates’ tweets were race, abortion, education, and the economy, comprising about 20 percent of all candidate tweets. Pew also reported that more than 75 percent of the candidates had tweeted about all four of those issues at least once this year.

Democrats were heavier Twitter users than Republicans, posting 55 percent of all tweets covered in the study as compared to Republicans producing 33 percent. This follows past Pew Research Center studies showing candidates who lean left are more likely than those who lean right to use Twitter.

Unsurprisingly, there was a partisan divide in what topics were mentioned in tweets from Democratic and Republican candidates. Republicans created almost two-thirds of tweets about immigration, while Democrats produced the overwhelming number of tweets about LGBTQ issues, abortion, or the environment.

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