Republican Candidates for the US House Up to 7 Times More Successful on Social Media

Republican candidates for the US House of Representatives are profoundly ahead of their Democratic counterparts when it comes to utilizing social media for campaign goals.

The marketing engineering firm Online Impact Group LLC has recently completed an analysis of 15,756 social media posts from October 1-14, 2024, across 1,313 Facebook and Instagram profiles of candidates for the US House of Representatives. The results of the analysis show an exceptionally large gap in social media success factors, with Democratic candidates’ posts receiving much less enthusiasm and interest from their followers compared to how Republican candidates’ posts are received.

The charts below show comparisons of the reactions that Republican candidates’ posts received during the first two weeks of October. On Facebook, each post by a Republican candidate gained on average over four times as many likes as each Democratic candidate’s post received.

Similarly, Instagram posts by Republican candidates for the House received nearly five times as many likes as posts by Democratic House candidates.

More extreme is the difference in number of shares that the Republican candidates’ posts received. On average, Republican House candidates received nearly seven times as many shares on their Facebook posts as did Democratic house candidates. (Note that on Instagram, the number of shares is not publicly available).

The large margin that Republicans have over Democrats in number of shares per post is very important: Shares are one of the most beneficial signals that any post can give back to the social media platform’s algorithms. Among other signals, the algorithms watch each post’s number of shares as they decide who else to show the post to – including people who aren’t yet followers.

Overall Spreading of Their Party’s Message

Looking just at the volume of likes and shares of candidates’ posts – a way to compare how messages are being seen overall – the numbers are equally striking. Republican House candidates’ posts in the first two weeks of October 2024 received a much larger number of total likes on both Facebook and Instagram.

A takeaway from the above two charts is that from a high-level, national view, the Democratic messaging is being seen and liked on social media at a volume of less than a quarter of the Republican messaging. This may be a strong indicator that Republican House candidates are much more adept at using social media to generate interest and enthusiasm.

Why These Numbers Matter: Effects on the November 2024 Election

Prior studies including ones from Pew Research Center and The Brookings Institution, alongside interviews with Meta Employees indicate that social media has highly impactful effects on elections. Social media efforts done poorly in an election context can lead to:

• Fewer chances to attract and connect with younger voters
• Reduced opportunity to counter false and misleading statements
• Diminished opportunities to encourage voter turnout

At the time of this writing, the November 2024 election outcome is predicted to be highly sensitive to voter engagement factors such as those mentioned above, especially voter turnout. In fact, voter turnout has been discussed by Meta employee Antonio Garcia Martinez as being a crucial election outcome factor that can be manipulated through targeted social media use.

If get-out-the-vote initiatives on social media are in the plans, then at the moment, Republican House candidates may find success over their Democratic opponents simply by being more social media savvy and paying attention to what works for businesses who depend on social media for gaining both new customers as well as customer loyalty.

Comments on Posts; Paid Advertising

As can be seen across many posts by politicians, the attitudes conveyed in comments on both Democratic and Republican candidates’ posts range from extremely negative to extremely positive, with long threads of arguments filling up the comments. As a result, comments on posts were excluded in this analysis, with only likes and shares being considered as indicative of abilities by each party to generate enthusiastic reactions in the form of likes and shares from followers.

In addition to excluding comments, this analysis does not take into account the presence of any paid content such as sponsored posts or any other advertising options available on the social media platforms. However, if the reactions from paid content for a given candidate gets fully measured, it provides excellent background information that can be used to make non-paid posts more appealing. We suspect that this type of cross-pollination between paid and non-paid content may not be happening within most of the Democratic circles, simply due to the glaring discrepancy between Democratic and Republican post success.

Possible Reasons Why Republicans Are So Far Ahead in Social Media Performance

As mentioned earlier, social media platform algorithms – the programs running inside Facebook and Instagram– constantly analyze the behavior of the followers who view the posts. The algorithms are programmed to show new posts to a small set of followers to see how much they like, comment, and/or share, to decide if the post is worthy of showing to more followers.

To generate more likes and shares, it’s crucial to adhere to the latest ‘rules of the game’, such as what types of posts generate the most attention in the form of likes, shares, and comments. One might think that for Republicans to be so much farther ahead in gaining likes and shares, there would be a significant difference between the types of posts – reels, images, carousels, etc. – being published compared to Democrats. However, the differences were on the order of 1.5x and so nowhere near the 4x and up levels seen in the engagement data.

Our Takeaway

Through process of elimination, we believe that the content of the Democratic House candidates’ posts may be significantly less attention-getting and/or emotion-triggering than the content of the Republican House candidate’s posts. This deficit in publishing interesting posts is very likely keeping their followers’ interest and enthusiasm from rising to the level of their Republican counterparts’ followers, with the potential of lower Democratic voter turnout.

From a marketing engineering perspective, a much-simplified summary of our findings can be conveyed by drawing a business parallel: If a business in a competitive market had such low social media success relative to their competitors as Democratic House candidates do, that business would be eclipsed by the competition in its attempts to promote and sell its offerings using social media.

For more information on the analysis performed, including how it was conceived after utilizing the ImpactFox social media scorecard tool, or to learn about other marketing measurements, contact Online Impact Group via email at contact@onlineimpactgroup.com.

Read the Official Press Release here.