Twitter allows political candidates to broadcast messages directly to the public, some of
which spread virally, potentially reaching new supportive audiences. During the 2014 US
gubernatorial election, 74 candidates for State Governor posted 20,580 tweets, of which
10,946 were retweeted almost 140,000 times. By analyzing a collection of tweets posted by
gubernatorial candidates that were classified by machine learning into categories of
message types, we find that while candidates tend to post tweets that advocate for …