This Week's (New and Improved) 2016 Twitter Power Rankings
Hello and welcome to Week 4 of the Slatest’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings, where you’ll notice things look a little different this week. Above, you’ll find a handy interactive of the entire week’s worth of candidate tweets: how many each White House hopeful sent and how often they were retweeted and favorited, along with how each fared in the 140-character fight with their political rivals on both sides of the aisle. (Click to zoom in on a particular candidate, and click again to see the content of each tweet.)
Below, meanwhile, you’ll find our tried-and-true method of ranking each candidate’s single most successful tweet of the past seven days. Together, the two offer a helpful snapshot of what topics dominated the political conversation online, and also give us some insight into which contenders are winning the campaign Twitter wars and why.
The ground rules (which have been tweaked slightly this week to account for our shiny new toy):
- For the rankings below, we’re defining a candidate’s most successful tweet as the one that receives the most retweets.
- Tweets that include a direct request for a retweet are ineligible for the traditional rankings because that’s cheating. RT if you agree! (Retweet-begging tweets, though, will still appear in the interactive at the top.)
- Only tweets from the past seven days are eligible. Since we’ll publish the weekly rankings every Friday, that means any tweet sent in the seven days prior to when we hit the big red button shortly before 10 a.m. to cull all the data.
You’ll find this week’s takeaways at the bottom, but without any further ado:
1.) Jeb Bush (Last week: 11)
Sorry Mom
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) September 17, 2015
2.) Bernie Sanders (2)
Trump: "I will take care of women." Really? What about respecting the right of women to control their own bodies? #DebateWithBernie
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 17, 2015
3.) Hillary Clinton (3)
Assumptions and fear don't keep us safe—they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building. https://t.co/ywrlHUw3g1
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 16, 2015
4.) Donald Trump (Last week: 1)
"@HamishP95: @realDonaldTrump My Dad is thinking of voting for the first time ever for you. pic.twitter.com/1u9qi8qUPc" Great.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2015
5.) Ben Carson (5)
Once more, I step aside Lord, let your voice resonate above all.
— Dr. Ben Carson (@RealBenCarson) September 16, 2015
6.) Rand Paul (8)
.@BernieSanders socialism requires force, for me I'll choose freedom. #standwithrand
— Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 17, 2015
7.) Carly Fiorina (9)
I dare @HillaryClinton & @BarackObama to watch these videos & tell Americans we should fund them w/ taxpayer $$. http://t.co/E0QN2Y9PWE
— Carly Fiorina (@CarlyFiorina) September 17, 2015
8.) Ted Cruz (4)
If I'm elected President, we’ll kill the terrorists, repeal Obamacare, and defend the Constitution! #CNNDebate https://t.co/2mrCdvIX4C
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 17, 2015
9.) Marco Rubio (13)
The Constitution is more than just a document: It is the heart of our great nation. Let us never cease to defend it. pic.twitter.com/iu84L00OxU
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 17, 2015
10.) Mike Huckabee (7)
You kill ISIS like you'd kill a rattlesnake. Step 1: Grab a shotgun. Step 2: Blow it’s head off. #CNNDebate
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) September 17, 2015
11.) George Pataki (10)
#NeverForget the men and women who died on #Sept11 and those who everyday put on a uniform to defend our freedoms. pic.twitter.com/qnro57QjrU
— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) September 11, 2015
12.) Bobby Jindal (6)
.@realdonaldtrump Wow. Is there a world leader you DO recognize? Is this guy going to vote for you too? pic.twitter.com/Cwn0Z5YqTJ
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) September 12, 2015
13.) Chris Christie (20)
No one cares cc: @realDonaldTrump @CarlyFiorina #TellingItLikeItIs #CNNDebate https://t.co/30gfFmQeBE
— Chris Christie (@ChrisChristie) September 17, 2015
14.) Scott Walker (12)
Gov. Walker to @RealDonaldTrump: "We don't need an apprentice in the @WhiteHouse, we have one right now." #CNNdebate https://t.co/vPkvQdRG4v
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) September 17, 2015
15.) John Kasich (16)
This is what leadership looks like. #CNNDebate https://t.co/oBftDXp4et
— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) September 17, 2015
16.) Martin O’Malley (17)
All you’ll hear on the #GOPdebate stage is racist rhetoric & backward ideas. #WeNeedDebate http://t.co/hKpBWls4My pic.twitter.com/0U9lbiJMH4
— Martin O'Malley (@MartinOMalley) September 17, 2015
17.) Rick Santorum (15)
Personal attacks between Republicans pleases one person: Hillary Clinton #GOPDebate #CNNDebate
— Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) September 16, 2015
18.) Lindsey Graham (18)
Whether you're the wedding cake baker, the gay couple, or preacher - radical Islam would kill you all if they could. #ReadyToLead #CNNDebate
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 16, 2015
19.) Lincoln Chafee (21)
An hour in #cnndebate & they've started WWIII and bashed women. Next: beating on immigrants and more damage to the poor & Middle Class.
— Lincoln Chafee (@LincolnChafee) September 17, 2015
20.) Lawrence Lessig (unranked)
Presidential Candidate Lawrence @Lessig Steps Up To Assist @KimDotcom http://t.co/zb9JTO0ucC via @torrentfreak
— Lessig2016 (@Lessig2016) September 17, 2015
21.) Jim Webb (19)
I would never support raising taxes on ordinary earned income. But we need a better way. https://t.co/B3E8uZ9zn8 pic.twitter.com/jE6H3nkEEr
— Jim Webb (@JimWebbUSA) September 14, 2015
22.) Jim Gilmore (22)
Sen. Santorum position makes no sense.
— James S Gilmore (@gov_gilmore) September 16, 2015
Dropped out: Rick Perry
Single Tweet Winner: Jeb!
Jeb Bush wasn’t the big winner at Thursday’s GOP debate—that honor went to Carly Fiorina—but the one-time Republican front-runner did manage to display enough much-needed life during the marathon event to score big online. The moment that resonated the most in our rankings was his very public admission on stage that he smoked pot back in his youth. “Forty years ago, I smoked marijuana and I admit it,” Bush said after Rand Paul and the moderators alluded to the fact (which had previously been reported). "I’m sure that other people might have done it and may not want to say it in front of 25 million people. My mom’s not happy that I just did." (As you can see in the interactive, though, Jeb didn’t have anywhere close to the same success with the rest of his online musings and rejoinders.)
Overall RT Winner: Bernie!
While the Republican field was duking it out on stage in Southern California, Bernie Sanders was scoring left and left on Twitter. Thanks in large part to his #DebateWithBernie-themed commentary on Thursday, Sanders accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total RTs accrued by the entire field this week. He was an equal opportunity GOP attacker, too, hitting everyone from Donald Trump to John Kasich, while also playing to type by peppering his CNN play-by-play with plenty of policy talk.
Loser: Donald.
No the honorific for Trump this week. The brash billionaire was unable to bowl over his rivals with the sheer force of his ego on the debate stage, and had a similarly—albeit relatively—lackluster showing on social media, normally a safe haven for the tough-talking GOP front-runner. Adding insult to injury: His most RT’d message of the past seven days was one he clearly would have liked to have back. In it, Trump—or whoever runs Trump’s account—trumpeted the apparent endorsement of some random user’s dad. In reality, though, that faux-support was coming from a prankster who had sent along a photo of Jeremy Corbyn, the newly elected leader of the British Labour Party. Whoops.