On Twitter, House GOP has edge over Democrats

By DAVID CHARNS, KRISTEN BARBARESI and KELLY F. ZIMMERMAN, Breitbart

WASHINGTON – Republicans have a 48-seat majority in the House. But on Twitter, they have a much bigger edge. Since 2007, Republicans have sent twice as many tweets as Democrats.

A Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona (SenJohnMcCain) is the most followed senator on Twitter. About 1.73 million people have specifically selected to track McCain, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.

Among Democrats, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri is the most followed. Her account (clairecmc) is followed by 58,000 people.

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio is the most followed member of the House with a combined 366,000 followers on his speaker account (SpeakerBoehner) and district account (JohnBoehner).

Far behind is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (NancyPelosi), the most followed House Democrat with 83,000 followers.

Such information—it changes from day to day—can be compiled from data available through Twitter and Facebook and tweetstats.com, a website that keeps statistics on such information as when a user most frequently tweets, and whom they tweet and retweet. For this story, data on social media were collected on Aug. 14 and reflect Twitter and Facebook information as of that date.

Other items drawn from the survey about congressional social media:

_75 percent of House Democrats send messages on Twitter; 86 percent of House Republicans tweet.

_42 of the 51 Democrats in the Senate tweet. Both independents tweet, as do 41 of 47 Senate Republicans.

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