Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump top 2016 Twitter power rankings.

The Week Martin O’Malley Got Some People to Retweet Him

The Week Martin O’Malley Got Some People to Retweet Him

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Dec. 4 2015 4:21 PM

This Week’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings

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Martin O'Malley speaks to guests at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on October 24, 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Rectangles are sized by number of retweets. Click on a candidate to zoom in.
Interactive by Andrew Kahn

Hello and welcome to Week 14 of the Slatest’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings. (We took last week off for Thanksgiving.) 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.) Bernie Sanders (Last week: 2)

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2.) Hillary Clinton (3)

3.) Donald Trump (1)

4.) Martin O'Malley (12)

5.) Ted Cruz (5)

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6.) Ben Carson (4)

7.) Rand Paul (10)

8.) Jeb Bush (9)

9.) Marco Rubio (6)

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10.) George Pataki (8)

11.) Mike Huckabee (11)

12.) John Kasich (15)

13.) Chris Christie (13)

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14.) Carly Fiorina (7)

15.) Rick Santorum (14)

16.) Lindsey Graham (16)

17.) Jim Gilmore (17)

Single RT Winner: Bernie Sanders

The mass shooting in San Bernardino dominated the political conversation this week and—much like the myriad mass shootings that came before it—divided the field in predictable ways. Democrats called for gun control; Republicans offered their thoughts and prayers (before later finding much more to talk about once authorities began to treat the shooting as a possible act of terrorism). Bernie's tweet proved the most popular, though Martin O'Malley and Hillary Cinton—who were both slightly quicker to weigh in than Sanders—were also rewarded with a cavalcade of retweets.

Overall RT Winner:  Donald Trump

That's ten in a row in this category for the Twitter troll in a $5,000 Brioni suit.

Other Winners: Rubio's Florida Gators and Kasich's Ohio State Buckeyes.

Loser: Intelligent political debate about the dangers posed by climate change.

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

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