The Left Hooks That Hit Hardest In 2023
The most viral anti-Republican posts of the year reveal a few key patterns.
For our final newsletter of 2023, Share Of Voice decided to take a pause from tracking the GOP crazy to highlight what worked: posts criticizing Republicans that got shared more than all others.
For this query, we kept it simple - rather that look for mentions of every GOP elected official (or former elected, in Trump’s case), these were posts that specifically used the word “Republican/s” or “GOP” - that way, even if individuals were being singled out in a particular post, the mention of their party label suggested a broader attack on the party at large.
The Issues That Mattered Most
The clear winner was guns - 9 of the top 20 posts, including the top 2, were related to gun violence:
Next was a surprise to me: entitlement security (4 of the top 20, including 3 of the top 6):
Next was LGBTQ+ issues (3 of the top 20):
Abortion rights (2 of the top 20):
And Racism (2 of the top 20):
(Some posts obviously appear in multiple categories.)
What’s also interesting is that these topics appealed to different people. Women participated more overall, but were much more likely than men to share the viral posts about abortion and entitlement security (labeled here as “SS/Medicare”), while the male/female gender split was more balanced on racism:
And these topics were often shared by different age groups. The most stark contrast seen was between Guns/LGBTQ+ issues, which appealed more to younger people, and entitlement security, which (unsurprisingly) skews older:
The other two topics, abortion rights and racism, were more or less evenly distributed among people 25 and older:
But that’s not all! These viral posts had other characteristics in common. Specifically, some of them employed a particular style of post, and these fell into three categories:
Style A: Call Out Hypocrisy
This was the most common setup, employed in 7 of the top 20 posts:
Style B: Sound The Alarm About Extremism & Glorification Of Violence
5 out of 20 used this approach (again, some posts fit into multiple categories here, which only increases their chances of appealing to different audiences):
Style C: Call For Accountability
These are your “Spread the word”/”Not one Republican voted for X”/”Remember in November” type posts.
These styles also appealed to slightly different audiences, with hypocrisy trending younger and appealing more equally to men and women, and accountability trending much older and appealing much more to women:
In short, there are multiple approaches and issues that will impact different audiences in different ways.
That’s it for the year! Here’s hoping you all have a safe and happy holiday, and in 2024, let’s all go forth and flex that digital content with these hot new tips - we’ve got an election to win!