Since social media first entered presidential election campaigns as a serious player in 2008, all eyes have been on Twitter to help us forecast which candidates are hot, and which are not. But how can we really tell who’s winning the race on the internet? There are a lot of different statistics we can look at, and media outlets now often report which candidates are most tweeted about during debates and other major campaign related events.
We’re going to look at the simplest and most accessible metric for determining which candidates are looking successful on Twitter right now: The number of followers they have. Here are the total number of followers for the top candidates for republicans and democrats in the race for the White House.
The republicans are heavily represented because, while Carson was a close second just a few weeks ago, he’s rapidly declining in the polls, and is now nearly tied with Rubio and Cruz. This causes some ambiguity about who the most relevant and analysis worthy second candidate is. Because of this, we’re going to take a look at all 4 of the top right-wing contenders.
What does this Tell Us?
Not all that much, yet. The thing about Twitter is that having a lot of followers alone isn’t that exciting until we determine how many of them are real people. It’s common practice for businesses and politicians to use apps that follow and unfollow people on twitter to grow their audience. Since these apps are automated, many of them will accidentally or purposely pick up large numbers of spam accounts that are essentially worthless.
Fortunately, other apps like TwitterAudit exist to analyze an account’s followers to determine how many of their followers are real. When we take a look at those statistics, it starts to look fairly likely that Trump and Clinton have been relying heavily on tools like this.
However, even though both Trump’s and Clinton’s percentage of “real” followers are significantly worse than that of their competitors, their adjusted numbers of “real” followers still puts the two election juggernauts far ahead of their competitors.
What does this mean for the Election?
Trump has the most “real” Twitter followers by a significant margin. Moreover, he gained 800,000 new followers in the last 2 months, compared to the 400k followers each gained by Hillary and Sanders, followed by the significantly smaller audience growths by the other candidates.
Social media hasn’t been significant in elections long enough for us to draw reliable conclusions about election results based off this kind of information.
What it DOES tell us is that Donald Trump is getting more attention on the internet than any other candidate, which gives him powerful opportunities to spread his message and build his base.