The topic of this episode is, “Why are legislators on social media?”
We’ve all seen it, and if you haven’t, well, you will soon enough. Social media posts by members of Congress. They are on Facebook, X.com (what used to be called Twitter), Bluesky, and the like. The average voter may be forgiven for wondering, “Why are these lawmakers hanging out online? Don’t they have anything better to do?”
To try to help us better understand what is going on here, I have Annelise Russell, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Russell has been studying legislators’ use of social media for years and is the author of Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter (Oxford, 2021). So who better to discuss this topic with us?
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Dr. Russell, welcome to the podcast.
Annelise Russell:
Thanks for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s start with the question of who is where online. Certainly I have seen senators and members of the House of Representatives on X/Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, and Substack. Is there any pattern to where legislators are on these different platforms? Do they cluster in particular places, or not?
Annelise Russell:
The answer is a little column A and a little column B.
Most members are on X/Twitter—people still colloquially call it Twitter, so I do as well—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. There’s a lot of mass-adoption across these different platforms because they all speak to different audiences. There’s this understanding that there’s a number of platforms that meet a number of different audiences, and so it makes sense to sort of layer them together.
But there are distinct differences. You’ve got Republicans on Truth Social, you’ve got Democrats who are advertising the fact that they’re on Bluesky and that you can find them there, so you have started to see some fragmentation and polarization across which places they turn. But for the lion’s share of sort of this digital age of politics—the last sort of 15 years or so up until really recently—Congress has sort of moved in very slow lockstep when it comes to the digital platforms that they use.
Kevin Kosar:
One thing I’ve noticed is that legislators often have different accounts on the same platform. One account they identify as their personal account, another is deemed their reelection account, and the other is their official account. Why do they have different accounts?
Annelise Russell:
Congress has rules about what you can do as an official member and what you can say. There’re a lot more restrictions on the official side about what you can say, yet there’s some authority that comes with it. This is the official account of X member. What gets sent on this account should be and is now at least considered official statements. And by and large, that official account is run by their official-side team, folks who are funded with tax dollars by Congress versus the campaign team, which is definitely not that and never should the two technically meet.
To be clear, you’re not necessarily going to get wildly different agendas on either platform, but you are going to get somewhat different audiences, somewhat different strategies from the campaign and the official side, given the official side constraints.
Kevin Kosar:
Is social media the 21st century version of the congressional frank? Or is it something more? For listeners, the “frank” is the privilege legislators have to send out mail to constituents, newsletters and missives which tell voters about all the important things they are doing on Capitol Hill.
Annelise Russell:
I think it’s definitely more than that. These are two fundamentally different parts of a congressional office. First, the frank is understood as sort of a constituent communication piece, and the notion that social media is a constituent communication tool primarily is a complete farce. Some platforms are more primarily for constituent communications, but if you’re trying to reach your geographic constituents on Twitter, I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you.
Franking continues to this day, sort of from the traditional mail experiences that we experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. You still have mail, but you also have Facebook advertisements and telephone town halls and text messages. You have this entire toolbox that you can use for modern day franking.
But what’s really happened is social media has been adopted really in parallel. When it comes to communications, the best way to understand communications in a congressional office is in three different buckets. The first bucket is earned media: journalists, things you do to get on TV, to get in the newspaper, etc. A second bucket is paid media, which includes franking: things you have to pay for to get your name out there. And the third part of this is owned media, and traditionally this would’ve been just like websites or things like that, but increasingly that’s where social media lives.
The buckets of paid media and owned media have really gotten bigger alongside one another over time. Nothing is being replaced, but what we are seeing is addition over time of things that offices and staff and members are expected to do and to do really well.
Kevin Kosar:
I don’t follow members’ of Congress social media as closely as you, but it’s clear to me that different members are doing different things. Senator Charles Grassley’s X.com account is very different from, say, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram account, or former Representative Jeff Jackson’s Substack. But one thing they have in common is that they often seem to be speaking to an audience beyond their constituents. Why are they doing that?
Annelise Russell:
That’s the million dollar question. But the reality is that political power and political relevance in today’s climate looks very different than it ever used to. The notion that your power within the institution typically was defined by tenure—how long have you been there? Have you paid your dues? Do you know more about agricultural subsidies than anyone else in the building? Or are you part of party leadership? Which is another way in which you’ve paid your dues.
Today, though, this notion of power can also stem from the persona in the presentation that you build. There are lots of examples of this across the aisle. Chuck Grassley and his ability to use a folksy way of deriding the lack of history content on the History Channel, or AOC’s ability to utilize digital technology extremely well. You’ve seen people build up reputations that stem not just from their policy work or their ability to work within the institution, but the reputation that they’ve built across the institution.
It’s largely reflective of our politics today. It the notion that a Democrat in Colorado looks a lot more like a Democrat from Delaware than they ever have before. Because of that, there’s this incentive to build that profile. It’s the reason why we see non-leadership or non committee chairs on Meet the Press when 20 years ago, that would’ve just been absurd—no one would’ve cared what Nancy Mace had to say on Meet the Press. Yet here we are.
There’s also an additional game to be played—an additional audience to pursue—because there are electoral concerns for that. Donors and money can be raised outside the district. There’s the ability to position yourself as an expert regardless of what your policy chops are. In a world where presentation matters a lot more than it ever has before, the ability to utilize these platforms well—which is not everyone’s skill—has been much more highly valued than we might’ve ever anticipated.
Kevin Kosar:
As you’ve dug into the content analysis, have you detected types of strategies that each member is employing, whether it’s a self styling before constituents, position taking, etc.?
Annelise Russell:
On a positive note, it’s not everything that we see on the evening news, but over 60% of what happens on particularly congressional Twitter is all policy related. If you’re thinking, ‘Oh gosh, this is just a political cesspool,’—and to be clear, I’m not denying that that has its faults—there’s a lot of policy discussion happening, if only for the fact that part of the goal of most members when their staff are posting on these platforms is to hope that a journalist or a booker from some news production sees that post and thinks that that member would be a great guest or a great interview. There’s a launching pad from the owned media to earned media that exists and is extremely important. But there’s a lot more policy than people think if you’re following members closely.
The other part of this is being mindful that no one’s there accidentally and everyone has a strategy. Whether or not they’re good at executing it is another thing, but a lot of it matches what we would expect based on representation and electoral considerations. For instance, I said earlier geographic constituents do not pay attention to Twitter. Yet, someone like Senator Lisa Murkowski is always talking about Alaska, and that’s not surprising in the least—that is her priority, and she has no interest in getting into political battles or being punchy on X. That’s just not a priority.
Compare that to someone within her caucus like Senator Josh Hawley, who in the wake of the leak of the Dobbs decision, he was quick, first, always there to make a comment. He caught the news cycle. And lo and behold, who was the picture with the lead story in Roll Call the next day? Senator Josh Hawley. So there’s a strategy there, based on partisanship, based on electoral choices, and based on the type of lawmaker that they want to be.
Kevin Kosar:
And we can’t forget that it’s long set of senators who each day, they wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and imagine themselves as president.
There’s probably a bit of that going on.
Annelise Russell:
A hundred percent. There’s a reason Bernie Sanders has an extremely good relationship with his photographers and videographers.
Kevin Kosar:
Do we have any evidence that when legislators post on social media that they are swaying votes in Congress?
Annelise Russell:
I think the best way to think about it is that social media doesn’t necessarily directly translate to legislative outcomes, but what it does translate to is policy and political agendas—before any action can be taken, someone has to be paying attention.
I think the greatest power of social media—and media writ large—is the ability to frame what people are thinking about and to elevate issues. It’s the reason that today we’re all talking about Medicaid and a CBO, and that is because that’s what journalists are talking about. That’s what’s on congressional/political Twitter. It doesn’t necessarily change our position, but it forces us to grapple with different issues.
It’s that ability to force us to grapple with different issues and to change the conversation. President Trump—particularly during his first term—was so good at this. He would say something at 3:00 AM and that’s what we’d all have to talk about for the first three hours of any congressional day. It wasn’t that he changed anyone’s mind or that he necessarily forced any new legislation. It’s just that everyone had to grapple with, did they agree with what he said and how it was gonna affect the rest of their day. And I think, to a certain extent, that same pattern rings true.
Kevin Kosar:
As you were saying that, it occurred to me that in the last couple of weeks here in Washington, DC, we have these wranglings going on about reconciliation and how to make the numbers work out the way the GOP majorities in each chamber would like. And there was a trial balloon floated about a national fee to register cars, and I first saw that on social media. It popped up and then suddenly everybody was talking about it. And within 24 or 48 hours, you had members of Congress saying that this idea was not going forward. This is something that might have potentially made its way further along in the legislative process in a pre-social media day when information could be a little better controlled. But in today’s social media information environment, it didn’t last very long.
Annelise Russell:
Yeah, but it’s a fire that burns hot and fast. Something can catch on very quickly and we all think, ‘Okay, this is where we’re gonna be.’ And then two hours later the conversation changes because party leader decides one thing, a president says another thing, and we’re 10 steps down the road and around the corner than from anywhere we thought we’d ever be.
Kevin Kosar:
In your study of all this tweeting and sharing online, what’s your most interesting finding or thing that you have discovered?
Annelise Russell:
I think part of it is this realization that communications is almost if not just as important as policy. For a long time, we’ve thought of communications as sort of the window dressing or the appetizer to the main platter.
Regardless of what you think about Twitter or if you’ve ever read a social media post, it affects the information that you have about Congress. Most of us aren’t reading the congressional record and then making determinations about how we think Congress is functioning. Most of what you know about Congress comes from some communication medium, whether that be a communications director and a journalist, a social media post, etc. So understanding just how central communications and digital communications is to that congressional ecosystem, I think is the biggest sort of shift in phenomena that I’ve been able to be a part of.
We’re no longer in this world where it’s just a workhorse or a show horse. Everyone is a show horse now. You can’t get elected to Congress without being some sort of presentation-minded individual, but the question is, “What is that next step?” “How do you then use that presentation?” Part of that is understanding just the realities of how much work it takes to be effective at communications, the toll it takes on an office.
Congress is slow to figure out technology and digital, and we are still in this space of trying to figure out what comes next for communications, particularly because it’s often managed by a 25-year-old, at least on the House side.
Kevin Kosar:
So in answering that question, you’ve basically answered what I posed up in my introduction of you, which is, your average voter may see members of Congress posting on Twitter or Facebook and think, ‘What are you doing? Don’t you have more important stuff to do?’ And the answer is not really, because persuading one’s colleagues and persuading voters is inherent to the duties of a member of Congress. You cannot be effective if you’re not communicating, right?
Annelise Russell:
I think so. You can have the greatest policy in the world, but if no one knows about it—if you don’t have the capacity to move legislation or the capacity to convince others—it’s likely to die in a folder or a Google Drive somewhere.
I think it’s the people who are most successful in Congress and typically the people who rise to leadership positions are those who are able to be adapt at doing both. There aren’t many people who are really good at being effective communicators and effective policy makers. They’re often two distinct characteristics, but it’s a spectrum.
Kevin Kosar:
I will add that communication sometimes opens the possibilities for policy. I once spoke with a long-term aid to a very liberal member of Congress who, when you looked at the number of bills this person actually gets through Congress and into law, worked very few.
And I told him, “Honestly, your member’s not particularly effective. Not to be insulting, but I’m just saying this is what the data show,” and the response was instantaneous, which is, “That’s not the only thing we do. By the way, my member was talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour before anyone was, and you know what we’re talking about right now in Congress? Raising the wage to $15 an hour.” This happened a few years ago when that moment was there. And his point was that the communications move the so-called Overton window. And by getting out there and talking about this, he wasn’t racking up lots of bills getting turned into laws, but was setting the moment for when there could be that policy action.
Last question. I understand you have a new book in the works, titled, Tweeting Scared: Congressional Crisis Communications and Constrained Capacity. What’s it about and when does it come out?
Annelise Russell:
Yeah, this book is in production and so hopefully it comes out at the end of this year or early next year. But this book takes a look at the behind the scenes of communication in Congress. We’ve all seen tweets, we’ve all seen Facebook posts, but how does any of that come to fruition? What does that mean for an office? How do they organize themselves? And what does this mean for how Congress functions?
And in this book, I detail that process, such that it’s best understood as a crisis in the sense that Congress communicates on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis without having the actual capacity to do so. You’ve got congressional offices on a shoestring budget trying to be the most effective PR firms in the world. And what that means is a lot of members just simply can’t get in the game effectively, and it puts a heavy burden on an office to be able to try to do all of these different things that we’ve talked about today and to do all of them effectively.
What does that mean? That means leaders have an advantage because they actually do have resources and they have members who rely on them for all of these digital demands that they can’t meet. Right? And so it incentivizes things like conflict and negativity because those have high engagement scores and people like high metrics. It doesn’t necessarily change anything that wasn’t already there, but it incentivizes these additional trends that a lot of people otherwise would rather not see.
Kevin Kosar:
That sounds terrific. Professor Annelise Russell, thank you very much for helping us better understand why legislators are on social media.
Annelise Russell:
Of course. Thank you for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
Stay in the know about our news and events.