Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump win Twitter power rankings.

With the Brush of a Shoulder, Hillary Wins Twitter This Week

With the Brush of a Shoulder, Hillary Wins Twitter This Week

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The Slatest
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Oct. 30 2015 6:18 PM

This Week’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings

493755608-democratic-presidential-candidate-and-former-secretary
State Hillary Clinton testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi October 22, 2015 on Capitol Hill.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Click on a candidate to zoom in.
Interactive by Andrew Kahn

Hello and welcome to Week 10 of the Slatest’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings. Above, you’ll find our 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 which topics dominated the political conversation online and also give us some insight into which contenders are winning the campaign Twitter wars and why.

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The ground rules again:

  • 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 at around 10 a.m. to cull all the data.

Without any further ado:

1.) Hillary Clinton (Last week: 3)

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2.) Donald Trump (2)

3.) Bernie Sanders (1)

4.) Marco Rubio (9)

5.) Ben Carson (6)

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6.) Ted Cruz (7)

7.) John Kasich (5)

8.) Jeb Bush (4)

9.) Rand Paul (8)

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10.) Martin O'Malley (11)

11.) Carly Fiorina (13)

12.) Chris Christie (18)

13.) Mike Huckabee (10)

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14.) George Pataki (12)

15.) Lawrence Lessig (17)

16.) Rick Santorum (15)

17.) Bobby Jindal (14)

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18.) Lindsey Graham (16)

19.) Jim Gimore (19)

Overall RT Winner: Trump.

Ben Carson may be gaining on him—and in some cases, passing him—in the national polls, but the former neurosurgeon's more measured approach (or anyone else's) can't compete with Trump's shear social media wattage. That makes six overall victories in a row for the Donald.

Single RT Winner: Clinton.

Prediction: This will not be the last time we see Team Hillary dusting off this gif from her Benghazi testimony.

Josh Voorhees is a Slate senior writer. He lives in northeast Ohio.

Andrew Kahn is Slate’s assistant interactives editor. Follow him on Twitter.