Tweeter-in-Chief

In this climate of hyper-partisan politics, you might think Democrat and Republican voters can’t come together on anything. But it turns out there’s at least one thing they do agree on: the president’s tweets.

A new University at Buffalo-led study finds that both Democrats and Republicans, despite occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, tend to agree with each other on which of Trump’s tweets are better, and which are worse.

The researchers analyzed public response to more than 4,300 tweets shared by Trump between February 2017 and December 2018.

Of those tweets, 28% contained an insult and 22% contained a false statement, for which members of both parties expressed dislike. Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans felt more positive about tweets that offered support for the military or condolences; these accounted for 16% of the president’s tweets.

“We were initially a bit surprised because we had expected to find the opposite, where tweets Republicans liked most were those Democrats hated most,” says Kenneth Joseph, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at UB, and lead author of the study.

There remains some partisan divide between Democrats’ and Republicans’ responses, the researchers found, suggesting political implications as election season approaches.

While Republicans showed more support for tweets that insulted Democrats, both groups disliked tweets that insulted Republicans, demonstrating that the president’s attacks on his own party could potentially hurt him by decreasing support from his base.

And while tweets insulting women and the media bothered Democrats, they had no significant effect on Republicans, meaning those tweets could hurt Trump by agitating the opposing party without increasing support from his base.

Overall, Republicans were more forgiving of Trump’s actions, and were less likely to view him unfavorably, regardless of tweet content.

“Like it or not, Trump has ushered in a new way of expressing policy and personal perspective from the Oval Office,” says Joseph about his motivation to examine public reaction to the president’s tweets. “It’s critical that we understand how people on both sides of the aisle are responding to it.”