Nothing to See Here: Republican Congressional Members’ Twitter Reactions to Donald Trump

Abstract

How do co-partisans respond to the President on Twitter? This article examines whether and how Republican legislators reacted to President Trump in five instances when he broke with Republican Party policy positions or norms. We theorize that legislators’ electoral environment, constituency, and identity shape their response to the president, and we test our hypotheses using nearly 2,500 hand-coded tweets from Republican legislators between 2018-2020. The overwhelming reaction by Republican legislators to Trump’s actions was to ignore him. When members did react to the president, their response was primarily driven by their electoral environment and identity. Those from the most Trump supportive districts supported the president, and retiring members were most likely to oppose him. Male legislators were much more likely to support and oppose the president, while female legislators mostly ignored him. And, if they reacted, the most ideologically extreme Republicans were more likely to support than oppose the president. The implications of these findings are troubling. Even when President Trump violated traditional norms or deviated from long held party positions, his congressional co-partisans remained silent, occasionally offering support but rarely opposition.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Julia Manchester, “Ryan Roasts Trump: I ‘scroll through Twitter to see which tweets I will have to pretend I didn’t see,” The Hill, October 17, 2017. https://thehill.com/homenews/house/356338-ryan-roasts-trump-i-scroll-twitter-to-see-which-tweets-i-will-have-to-pretend.

2 Ana Swanson and Alan Rappeport, “Trump Increases China Tariffs as Trade Deal Hangs in the Balance,” New York Times, May 9, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/politics/china-trade-tariffs.html.

3 Ian Kullgren and Anita Kumar. “Trump Threatens Mexico with Tariffs over Immigration,” Politico, May 31, 2019. https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-threatens-mexico-with-tariffs-over-immigration/.

4 Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump on the Election,” November 5, 2020. Trump White House Archives. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-President-trump-election/.

5 While we expected most members would respond fairly quickly to the president if they planned to do so at all, we recognized that some members may have wanted to formulate a more considered response. Therefore, we selected time periods that allowed members to sleep on the event before responding. For events that occurred in the afternoon or evening, 24  hours was sufficient to capture the more considered tweets. The Mueller report was released in the morning, and for that reason we extended the time for collecting tweets to 35  hours to catch any members who needed part of the following day to formulate a response after taking the evening to consider the report.

6 As another measure of electoral vulnerability, we coded the number of primary challengers a member faced in the 2020 election. We omitted the variable from our models because we found that across bivariate and multivariate models, the number of primary challengers a member received did not explain their reaction to President Trump. One explanation for why this variable was insignificant in our models could be that we coded the number of primary challengers a member would receive in their next election (2020), rather than the number of primary challengers a member did receive in their most recent election (2016 or 2018).

7 We do not code members who are leaving Congress to run for other elective office among those who are retiring. They would still need to factor in political considerations in deciding how to react to the president.

8 To ensure our estimates are robust, we also estimate an ordered logit model (see Table A.1). Overall, the results are similar to the estimates in the multinomial logistic model.

9 Perhaps this was a subtle case of trolling and rebellion from Republican leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers?

10 Results largely align with the aggregate findings, but the smaller number of tweets, particularly in opposition, for each case limited the significance of some associations and increased the impact of individual congressional members’ Twitter behavior on the results.

11 The effects of retirement might be more nuanced depending on whether legislators were retiring because they felt vulnerable to defeat or because they were near the end of their career. However, we have too few retiring members in our sample to estimate whether seniority and/or electoral vulnerability of retiring legislators influences their reactions to the president.

Additional information

Funding

South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities.