The Implications of Issue Ownership and Political Partisanship on Twitter: A Case Study of 2018 United States Midterm Election in Relations to Flipped Seats.

This paper asks the research question: how are Issue Ownership and Political Partisanship implicated in campaign advertising on Twitter? Issue Ownership involves candidates choosing and committing to issues which best represent their ideologies and those of the voters. Political Partisanship is the ideology behind a candidate\u27s devotion to the party and its values and is usually measured on a scale. To answer the research question, a content analysis on the Twitter feeds of candidates who use Twitter will be carried out, using posts from October 6th and November 6th, 2018. This study will specifically focus on the seats that switched party lines in the 2018 United States Midterm Election. This is a work in progress; however, the data will have been analyzed by the conference date and the research and conclusions will be ready to present at that time. At this time, it is projected that Democratic candidates will be shown to be less partisan than Republican candidates, but that the Democrats will have created a more effective campaign nonetheless because of having controlled the issues and having made voters think about their vote from the perspective of these issues. With the upcoming election on November 3rd, 2020, and the rise of social media in society, this research shows how politicians use their social media and the different tactics available to politicians. This research helps us to understand the current political culture and the need for critical thinking by the voters in our current digital culture