TN 4th District Social Media Report Card

Catchy title for this post, eh? So, despite a small voice shrieking a warning from the back of my mind not to get sucked down into the political rabbit hole it appears I’m unable to help myself. Not sure any good can come of this, but apparently this is what I’m fixated on now.

Yesterday I voted in a primary election for, I think, my first time. I don’t really remember, but I know that I’d become quite interested in this one a little late in the race. As the election day wore on yesterday I decided to peek at the #electionday hash tag on Twitter to see if I could get a sense where things were headed. What I noticed was that were A LOT of tweets from the @VoteMarsha account but I didn’t really notice any coming from the candidates running for Tennessee’s 4th district for the U.S. House of Representatives. It piqued my curiosity so I decided to check the Twitter activity of each of the five candidates in the race. Which resulted in this tweet

I thought that was pretty surprising given that it was election day. And I was actually pretty generous when counting these up as I included tweets, replies, and retweets. The standalone tweet count was actually much lower. Next I wondered if maybe most of the action was instead taking place on Facebook. It may be turning into Grandma’s social media platform but it is easier to try and have an actual conversation over there. Pretty much the same results though you can see that some candidates have a clear preference for Zuckerberg’s data collection factory. Here was my tweet:

A few things jumped out at me. First I misspelled interesting. Second, I get the impression that DesJarlais couldn’t care less. Nothing on Facebook and on Twitter one was just retweeting Trump and another complaining about Google’s new censored search engine for China. No “I would be honored to have your vote”, “Please vote today”, “Kiss my ass”, “Kiss his ass”, nothing. I get the impression that he is completely unconcerned about November and, if we’re being completely honest, I sadly don’t have a ton of hope that there’s much reason for him to be concerned.

Two of the candidates, Christopher Hale and Steven Reynolds, actually replied to my tweets which I thought was fantastic! It let me know who was actually paying attention. Mr. Hale, who was the most active on social media pointed out that you could tell which candidate was the 29 year old which made me smile. Although Blackburn is 66 and Trump is 72 and they seem to have this stuff pretty well figured out. And Mr. Reynolds suggested that social media may not be a very good weapon in mobilizing the vote. I’m not sure I agree with that.

First, look no further than the president’s twitter account. Love him or hate him he generates a huge amount of buzz on Twitter and that spills over into more conventional forms of media. Also I thought we’d all pretty much come to the conclusion that much of the Russian “meddling” (aka information warfare) is taking place on social media. The Russian don’t seem to think it’s ineffective mechanism to influence voters! And Twitter handles are becoming as ubiquitous as URLs on marketing materials.

Second, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard oh if only we could find a way to reach out to young people and motivate them to participate in the elections! Guess where a long of young folks are hanging out these days? Go ahead I’ll wait.

Okay one other thing I wanted to touch on real quick that I didn’t tweet about yesterday. As I was gathering info on each candidate’s tweets, I happened to look at the bio section for each as well. Christopher Hale, Steven Reynolds, and Jack Maddux all have a hashtag or two in there description which is okay I suppose, but most importantly they have a link to their homepage where you can learn more about them and which is rightly the hub to any other presence they have online. Mariah Phillips has a hashtag in her bio, for whatever that’s worth, but the URL goes directly to a donation site from which there is no link to her main site or anywhere else. If you stumble across Mariah’s Twitter you’re going to have to make an extra effort to find out more about her. DesJarlais has no hashtags and no link to a web page. Not even his official government web page. Nothing. His bio should just say please go away.

This was by no means a deep dive and I didn’t even touch on their actual positions but, at least for me, did give me a little insight into their level of engagement and outreach at least on the digital front. In addition, I think it’s reasonable to wonder if a questionable internet presence / strategy translates into questionable execution elsewhere.

I wish I’d done this exercise a little earlier on, I believe I may have voted differently. It’s a bit of a bummer that the candidates that seem the least engaged online won their party’s primary. I hope that changes going forward.