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Electoral candidates can leverage at least three strategies to win votes: they can convince voters of the relevance of their programme and ideas (positive campaigning); they can convince them of the inadequacy or danger of their opponents’ programmes and ideas (negative campaigning); and finally they can make their name and that of their party familiar to the public. Taking the example of the 2017 French presidential election, we explore how politicians use social networks to activate these levers and how these actions articulate with those of their online activist communities on Twitter. We propose a number of quantitative measurements on different scales to describe the processes at play within political communities, and show that communities have distinct ways of articulating to their leaders’ strategies, pointing to heterogeneity in the forms of “division of labour” in activism. We also show that variations in communities’ strategies can help identify temporary weaknesses or a loss of confidence in a leader, as well as the structural position of candidates within the political arena. Finally, we identify an anomaly in the candidates’ attitude as a whole towards Marine Le Pen.