Sept. 25 trends: #Confirmkavanaugh? or #Believesurvivors?

LAST 24 HOURS IN A NUTSHELL:

Top House hashtags:

  1. #beavoter
  2. #30years
  3. #flipthehouse

Top Senate hashtags:

  1. #keeptexasred
  2. #confirmkavanaugh
  3. #scotus

Interesting climbers:

  • #mariposadebate (4th place House): Used by Democrat Jessica Morse referring to her debate against GOP incumbent Tom McClintock in California 04, and fairly widely picked up by supporters.
  • #believesurvivors (13th place House): Expressing solidarity with the women who have come out to tell their stories about Brett Kavanaugh, this has been particularly strong in California 25, thanks to Democrat candidate Katie Hill.
  • #socialismkills (16th place Senate): A pro-Cruz hashtag. The original tweeter is almost certainly a trollbot, according to Bot Sentinel. Such a perfect display of red-meat trollwork it really ought to be in a gallery, but instead we’ll just note it here.

GENERAL TRENDS

On the Senate side, Cruz’s supporters have unambiguously regained their Twitter supremacy, with today’s Cruz message focusing largely on the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. As previously, many of these tweets are using “click to tweet” pre-written content. See this weekend’s analysis of the Cruz “trollbot” army, if there’s any question about how genuine we believe this to be.

It is worth noting that — while the Kavanaugh/abuse allegation issue is demoralizingly ubiquitous on Twitter — it isn’t overwhelmingly common in the competitive-district election Tweeting we’re examining. #TXSen is the only district in which it’s being strongly instrumentalized on the GOP side (with considerably less action in #WVSen). #NESen is seeing a bit more #StopKavanaugh activity, while #believesurvivors, #christineblaseyford, and #anitahill — all showing solidarity with the Kavanaugh accusers — are scattered through a handful of House races.

On the House side, the ostensibly nonpartisan #beavoter, which Twitter itself is heavily promoting, is surging largely due to California 48‘s Democrat Harley Rouda, also source of the call to end incumbent Dana Rohrabacher’s #30years in office.

Dem hashtag #flipthehouse is most heavily focused in Kansas 03 and California 45 today, both districts featuring women running against GOP incumbents.