......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 748 PS • October 2016 © American Political Science Association, 2016 doi:10.1017/S1049096516001700 Politics Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump Justin H. Gross, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Kaylee T. Johnson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst ABSTRACT What drives candidates to “go negative” and against which opponents? Using a unique dataset consisting of all inter-candidate tweets by the 17 Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primaries, we assess predictors of negative affect online. Twitter is a free platform, and candidates therefore face no resource limitations when using it; this makes Twitter a wellspring of information about campaign messaging, given a level play- ing-field. Moreover, Twitter’s 140-character limit acts as a liberating constraint, leading candidates to issue sound bites ready for potential distribution not only online, but also through conventional media, as tweets become news. We find tweet negativity and overall rate of tweeting increases as the campaign season progresses. Unsurprisingly, the front-runner and eventual nominee, Donald Trump, sends and receives the most negative tweets and is more likely than his opponents to strike out against even those opponents who are polling poorly. However, candidates overwhelmingly “punch upwards” against those ahead of them in the polls, and this pattern goes beyond attacks against those near the top. Sixty of 136 dyads are characterized by lopsided negativity in one direction and only one of these 60 involves a clearly higher status candidate on the offensive. I n an age characterized by polarization in American politics and an expanding role for electronic media in campaigns, the time is ripe for an examination of candidate conflict conducted via social media. Scholars have previously sought to gauge the impact of “going negative,” attacking opponents based on their personal traits, issue positions, or the political party to which they belong (Surlin and Gordon 1977; Skaperdas and Grofman 1995). As Peterson and Djupe (2005) note, most research of this sort has focused upon the effects of negative campaigning on voter turnout (Peterson and Djupe 2005; Djupe and Peterson 2002; Kahn and Kenney 1999; Ansolabehere et al. 1994) and vote choice (Lau et al. 2007; Kaid 1997). Relatively few studies have investigated driving factors of the choice to attack opponents; scholarship far more often treats campaign tone as an explanatory variable than as an outcome to be explained. To be sure, these two types of questions are not unrelated: if can- didates and their advisors believe negative messages are likely to be effective, they will be more likely to employ them (Lau and Rovner 2009). To the extent that such considerations are strate- gic, however, they are as likely to be driven by intuition and prior experience as by research. So the question of what drives negative campaigning is not reducible to the question of when such a strat- egy is likely to be effective. Empirical work treating negative campaigning as a dependent variable has focused on press releases (Flowers, Haynes, and Crespin 2003; Haynes, Flowers, and Gurian 2002), campaign advertisements (Hale, Fox, and Farmer 1996; Kahn and Kenney 1999; Damore 2002), and news reports (Haynes and Rhine 1998; Djupe and Peterson 2002; Peterson and Djupe 2005). In the 2016 US presidential primary season, social media have emerged as an important weapon in the campaign messaging arsenal, with Twitter 1 taking center stage. When it comes to newsworthy events such as a presidential campaign, Twitter’s audience is no longer limited to Twitter users; tweets themselves have become news and thus, essentially free advertising for candidates. For the first time, all candidates in a large field are active on Twitter and have used the platform to provide running commentary, allowing us to witness the emergence of negativity in real time. 2 Justin H. Gross is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He works on political communication, political network analysis, and measurement issues related to text and survey data. His current focus is on ideological diversity in US opinion media. He may be reached at jhgross@polsci. umass.edu. Kaylee T. Johnson is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on political communication and social class. She may be reached at ktjohnson@polsci.umass.edu. http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096516001700 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Massachusetts Amherst, on 18 Oct 2016 at 20:09:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at