Christopher J. Galdieri is Associate Professor of Politics at Saint Anselm College and the author of The Role of Twitter in the 2016 US Election , with Jennifer C. Lucas and Tauna S. Sisco. 

Read a free chapter,  “Tweet You Very Much: An Analysis of Candidate Twitter Usage from the 2016 Iowa Caucus to Super Tuesday ”, until March 16.

The Role of Twitter in the 2016 US Election is a scholarly examination of how Twitter – the social media platform through which users cast short messages onto the Internet – affected American politics during 2016.  We already know that its impact was large: Donald Trump has said that he owes his election to Twitter, and there is reason to believe him. Absent his active Twitter presence, Trump might never have completed his transitions from reality-show host to propagator of the nonsensical "birther" conspiracy theory to political gadfly to presidential candidate.  Above and beyond Trump, of course, other candidates used Twitter to take positions, attack or criticize opponents, and mobilize supporters, and citizens and news outlets alike read and responded to candidate tweets.  But there has not been a great deal of systematic research on how candidates used Twitter in 2016, how citizens responded, and what that means for the 2016 election and beyond.  This volume, which my Saint Anselm College colleagues Jennifer C. Lucas and Tauna S. Sisco and I edited, collects new research that examines Twitter's impact in 2016 from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

What can we learn about how candidates for president used Twitter in 2016?  Morgan Marietta and his coauthors explore how the issue positions of each party affects the ways candidates talk about policy on Twitter.  The brevity of Tweets – 140 characters in 2016, though that limit has since been raised to 280 characters – appears to lead candidates to emphasize those issues where they and their party have clear, straightforward positions that are easily expressed.  On those issues where parties and candidates have more complex positions, though, candidates tend to shy away from discussing them at all on Twitter.  Scott Granberg-Rademacker and Kevin Parsneau examine tweets made by candidates during the early primary contests, and find that candidates' patterns of tweeting reflect their standing in the race.  Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, tweeted less often and with an eye toward the general election, while her challenger, Bernie Sanders, directed his more frequent tweets at Clinton.  Meanwhile, the seventeen Republican candidates directed their fire at one another. Other chapters examine Donald Trump's patterns of Twitter usage.  Kim Hixson finds that media coverage of Trump's tweets disproportionately focused on those where he expressed confidence or anger and aggression, a finding that has implications for how Trump will keep using Twitter in office and for those who will run against him in 2020.  Luke Perry and Paul Joyce find that the quarter of Tweets Trump posted during early morning hours were more likely to be the subject of press coverage, a finding which demonstrates the impact Trump's use of Twitter has on the daily news cycle.  Mark O'Gorman observes the contrast between Trump's tweets about climate change before and after he became a candidate; once he was running for president, Trump rarely tweeted about the issue, even though he had made many tweets about it before he launched his campaign.  And Todd Belt compares the use of humorous political images on Twitter to similar posts on other social media platforms.  He finds that on Twitter, such images were more partisan and more likely to appeal to more informed and educated audiences. 

After the 2016 election, some speculated that Trump would tweet less often, or in a more restrained fashion.  Over a year into the Trump Administration, it is clear that this speculation was misguided.  As we watch Trump's tweets influence the morning news cycle, attack his opponents, claim credit for things that go well, and cast blame for those that do not, we can expect that his opponents in Congress and in the 2020 election will also make use of Twitter in their campaigns and their appeals to voters.  The research assembled in The Role of Twitter in the 2016 US Election will help make sense of the days, and Tweets, to come.