Bernie Sanders wins 2016 Twitter power rankings.

Hillary’s Love Can’t Trump Hate, but Bernie Can

Hillary’s Love Can’t Trump Hate, but Bernie Can

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Dec. 11 2015 5:25 PM

This Week’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings

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Bernie Sanders speaks during a 'National Student Town Hall' at George Mason University on October 28, 2015 in Fairfax, Virginia.

Photo by Alex Wong/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 15 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.) Bernie Sanders (Last week: 1)

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2.) Donald Trump (3)

3.) Hillary Clinton (2)

4.) Martin O'Malley (4)

5.) Jeb Bush (8)

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6.) George Pataki (1)

7.) Marco Rubio (9)

8.) Lindsey Graham (16)

9.) Rand Paul (7)

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10.) Ben Carson (6)

11.) Carly Fiorina (15)

12.) John Kasich (12)

13.) Ted Cruz (5)

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14.) Rick Santorum (15)

15.) Chris Christie (13)

16.) Mike Huckabee (11)

17.) Jim Gilmore (17)

Single RT winner: Bernie

Donald Trump may have hijacked the national conversation with his no-Muslims-allowed plan, but it was Bernie who held on to the top spot in our rankings by calling out Trump's proposal for what it is. Sanders' fellow Democrats found similar success, most notably Martin O'Malley who posted his second fourth-place finish in as many weeks.

Overall RT winner: Donald

That's 11 in a row in this category for a man who routinely accounts for about half of the total RTs garnered by the entire field in a given week.

Most Awkward Apostrophe winner: Toronto's Globe and Mail

It's OK, Canada, my hardened cynicism is no match for your children welcoming Syrian refugees to your country.

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

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