What leaders tweeted ahead of Assembly Elections 2018

Tweets about personalities, campaign itineraries and speeches were more prominent than those on issues of agriculture, prices or development

Photo: Reuters

More than issues around agriculture, prices or development, the Twitter messaging of key leaders from the three Hindi heartland states that went to polls focused on personalities, campaign itineraries and speeches.

This is the key finding of a subject-wise collation of 5,774 tweets posted by 12 leaders at the forefront of the just-concluded elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the two-month period up to 2 December.

For example, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief ministers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh focused less on agriculture (mentioning agriculture in just 5%, 1% and 1% of their tweets respectively).

The collective figure for the bevy of leaders spearheading the Congress campaign in these states was 14%, 11% and 7%, respectively. In contrast, more than half the tweets, on both sides, focused on snippets from their election campaign, playing up their own party leaders or playing down the opposition.

We extracted tweets from the Twitter handles of the three incumbent BJP chief ministers who were all pitched by their party as returning candidates: Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan and Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh.

Given that the Congress did not explicitly put out a clear designated leader, we did the same exercise for three of its leaders in Madhya Pradesh (Jyotiraditya Scindia, Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh), two in Rajasthan (Sachin Pilot and Ashok Gehlot), and three in Chhattisgarh (Bhupesh Baghel, T.S. Singh Deo and Charan Das Mahant). For Chhattisgarh, we also collated tweets by Ajit Jogi of the Janta Chhattisgarh Congress (J).

In all three states, BJP leaders were much more active on Twitter, running up an individual tweet count that matched the collective of the Congress. Of the three BJP chief ministers, Raje was the most active, averaging 22 tweets a day (chart 1).

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For all leaders, the 30-day period to elections in their respective state showed an increase in Twitter activity, none more so than Raje, whose daily average spiked to 28—nearly twice that of Chouhan, the next most active among this set of 12 leaders.

For both sides, the principal use of Twitter was to amplify their current election campaign. They used it to announce their campaign itineraries, post clips of speeches given by them or their leaders, and make video pitches to the voter, among other things.

Beyond that, there were differences in what they tweeted about.

The BJP chief ministers did take the development plank and did not mention opposition leaders at all. In comparison, the Congress leaders resorted more to attacking BJP leaders, as well as mentioning their own leaders.

The BJP chief ministers were also significantly more active in posting general messages like greetings for national and local festivals, commemorations and felicitations (for example, Chouhan tweeted about former cricketer Rahul Dravid, who was born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, being inducted in the ICC Hall of Fame) (chart 2).

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In all three states, one of the interesting sub-plots this election has been the Congress not designating a chief ministerial candidate, a touch of adversity made more pronounced by the old guard versus young brigade narrative (Gehlot versus Pilot in Rajasthan, Nath versus Scindia in Madhya Pradesh), and now made even more interesting by the touch-and-go exit poll results.

That multiplicity brought out different voices on Twitter, shaped possibly by their personalities and positions.

For example, among Congress leaders in Madhya Pradesh, Scindia tweeted the most in support of local Congress leaders, followed by Nath; but when Digvijaya Singh did mention a fellow party leader, it was almost always Rahul Gandhi.

Likewise, when they attacked the BJP, Scindia and Nath focused on the state BJP leadership, while Singh dwelled on national issues. In Rajasthan, Pilot’s tweeting eclipsed his colleague Gehlot and he, like Deo in Chhattisgarh, also touched on development issues more often (chart 3).

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Different subject areas of the two parties resonated differently with their followers, as indicated by their respective retweet count. In the broad category of issues (agriculture, prices and development), in all three states, BJP registered fewer retweets than Congress.

When it came to mentioning its own leaders, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh showed a different pattern than Rajasthan.

In these two states, the BJP handles registered fewer retweets than the Congress ones when it mentioned its own leaders; and the rare occasions it did mention the opposition, those tweets received more traction—a pattern seen in a previous collation of Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi tweets as well. In Rajasthan, where Modi and Amit Shah campaigned a fair bit, and featured in many of Raje’s tweets, the position was reverse (chart 4).

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Twitterverse on Tuesday promises to be interesting.

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