Tell Me an Instagram Story: Ephemeral Communication and the 2018 Gubernatorial Elections

Political campaigns are embracing the visual social media platform Instagram. One digital feature, the Story, has taken over feed sharing across social media. A Story is a sequence of images or videos uploaded to a profile that disappear after 24 hours. The Story is a novel feature relatively unexamined in political communications and marketing research. Specifically, it is unclear how Gubernatorial candidates employ the Instagram Story feature in campaigning. To address this gap, we content analyze 730 Instagram Stories drawn from 20 Gubernatorial candidate accounts one week before and after Election Day 2018. Results reveal that over half of the candidates employed the Story feature over the two-week period. The Story content primarily included indoor rallies and speeches rather than outdoor canvassing. Campaigns featured more static images than video in Stories and rarely used interactive features, such as animation, location tags, and emojis. Stories were also geared toward mobilization messages rather than voter support, behind-the-scenes looks, and attack ads. Last, some gender and political party differences were evident, as women and Democratic candidates utilized Instagram more.