Maine Politics, Twitterized

This is the first Maine election cycle in which the micro-blogging service Twitter is going to play a major roll, and we thought it worthwhile to take a look at how the two parties are doing on the medium. Most of the gubernatorial candidates, over a dozen legislators, and most of the Congressional delegation are active on Twitter. So who’s tweeting more?

Instead of just comparing number of accounts from members of each party, it makes more sense to compare the amount of actual content. After all, you don’t deserve much credit for having a Twitter account if you never tweet – it’s like having a website or blog that’s never updated. Indeed, there are several legislators who have Twitter accounts but are just lurking, with no posts yet. They don’t get any credit for that.

As you can see, Democrats are out-tweeting Republicans by far in the Maine Legislature, even though nationally Congressional Republicans are ahead by some accounts. How do things look for Maine’s congressional delegation, where only Olympia Snowe has yet to embrace the service?

Democrats appear to be well ahead here, too, partly because Congresswoman Chellie Pingree is very active on Twitter, while Mike Michaud and Susan Collins haven’t used the service as frequently. However, here Republicans are closer than in the Legislature. Finally, last but not least, what about gubernatorial candidates, that crowded field seeking to move into the Blaine House?

We have finally found a category where Republicans are out-tweeting the Democrats. Independents are out-doing both parties, but that is a smaller pool – just two of the non-partisan gubernatorial candidates are on Twitter so far.

Of course, these charts in no way judge the quality of the content being generated by candidates & office-holders (or their staff, at least). That’s for you to decide. But these do visualize how much various groups are utilizing the platform.

Don’t forget we have a list of the candidates used in this data at our Twitter political directory.