Democracy vs. witch hunt: What congressional campaigns are posting about Jan. 6 hearings, by party

Can you guess which party’s candidates were talking the most about Brett Kavanaugh in the past week, and which ones most frequently invoked the term "democracy"?

Welcome to the first installment of USA TODAY’s Red Words, Blue Words, a tracker for 2022 midterm elections rhetoric built to surface trending language, tone and topics being used by congressional campaigns across the country.

Red Words, Blue Words uses a suite of text analysis tools to connect the dots among Facebook and Twitter posts from more than 1,500 U.S. Senate and House campaigns. Some are still in the thick of primary battles within their parties. Some have won their nominations and are focused on the general election.

We’ll examine which words and phrases are heating up from week to week, then break down the lexicon by region, political party and some factors we probably haven’t yet considered. We’ll also zoom in on a small set of notable topics or congressional races.

We plan to offer insights throughout the election cycle — starting today.

January 6th hearings

Nearly 300 congressional campaigns posted about the Jan. 6 hearings during the seven-day period that ended Tuesday morning, with about the same number coming from each party. The substance of the posts diverged widely.

Phrases used heavily by Republicans and not Democrats included “witch hunt,” “primetime” and “sham.”

More apt to be used by Democrats — and not Republicans — were phrases such as “insurrectionists,” “overturn the election,” “capitol police” and ”proud boys,” a reference to the far-right group active in the Capitol assault.

Another way to look at the difference between Republican and Democratic rhetoric is to see which phrases gained usage the fastest on each side. Here are the seven-day trends:

As reflected in the rankings, Democratic candidates used their social media pages to talk up the importance of the congressional committee hearings and to attack Republicans for their lack of participation. The trending word "democracy" often came up in this context.

“If you were horrified by what you saw on January 6, 2021 understand that 35 Senate Republicans voted against a bipartisan commission to investigate that day,” wrote Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and Senate candidate John Fetterman on Facebook.

Among Republican candidates, meanwhile, the phrases “January 6th” or “prime time" were used in posts that belittled the televised proceedings (the “bogus J6 Circus Hearings”) and demanded similar airplay for topics ranging from Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to the damage created by Black Lives Matter protests.

“Inflation surged to 8.6% in May. Gas prices are hitting $5 per gallon nationwide. What is the Democrat majority in Congress busy doing? Wasting your tax dollars with their January 6 show trial,” wrote the campaign of J.R. Majewski, a Republican House candidate challenging Democrat Marcy Kaptur in Ohio.

The uniformity of language across many candidates of the same party is no accident, said Tom Marshall, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“Messaging is increasingly nationalized and dictated from the top through polls and focus groups,” said Marshall. “The point is to remind friendly voters of their party’s best messages.”

The strategy for each party is to “prime” voters to choose based on “a small set of favorable issues,” said Michael Parkin, a political scientist at Oberlin College. That’s why the GOP’s keywords tend to conjure the economy rather than abortion, gun control or Jan. 6, he said.

“Each party wants their strongest issues to be front and center in voters' minds on Election Day,” Parkin said.

And what about the phrase “supreme court justices,” which shot upward in popularity among GOP campaigns last week?

It was all about the arrest of an armed man outside of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home — a topic that got far less traction among Democratic candidates in a week dominated by the January 6 hearings.

Republican candidates heavily used words related to the arrest, many in an effort to move away from the hearings and call for legislation that would protect Supreme Court justices.

“When’s the primetime hearing on threats against Supreme Court Justices and their families?” wrote Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, on Twitter.

The up-and-down gun dialogue

While the volume of “January 6” mentions was about evenly split, the amount of discussion around guns has remained heavily lopsided since the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting.

Democratic campaigns mentioned the words "gun" or "guns" three times as often as Republicans in the last week, USA TODAY’s analysis shows. Driven by last weekend’s news that senators reached a bipartisan deal on gun reform, more than 900 posts mentioned guns – and more than 75% of them were from Democrats.

The words “gun” or "guns," as a proportion of all words used by campaigns each week, started to rise in usage compared to other terms like “abortion” and “inflation” after the mass shootings in Texas and Buffalo, New York.

But whereas Republican candidates have returned to talking about economic issues, the topic continues to crowd out others among Democrats, the data show.

The diverging approaches were summarized in a tweet last week from Loren Culp, Republican House candidate of Washington: “The Left is trying to make the midterms about abortion, gun control, and January 6th because our economy is crumbling under Biden. Don’t fall for the distractions. Vote with your checkbook.”

Aleszu Bajak is a data reporter on USA TODAY’s national investigative team. He can be reached at abajak@usatoday.com, @aleszubajak or by phone or Signal at (646) 543-3017.

Veronica Bravo and Javier Zarracina contributed to this report.

USA TODAY is tracking Facebook and Twitter posts of more than 1,500 congressional campaigns using data from KnowWho, which keeps lists of elected officials. Some campaigns feeds are no longer active. Rising phrases are based on top percentage point gains in share of all phrases posted by candidates. In some cases, duplicate phrasing and terms coming from one account are removed from the analysis. USA TODAY also used a method known as TF-IDF to surface words used by candidates of one party and not the other.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jan. 6, inflation, Trump: Tracking 2022 election candidates' word use