Donald Trump wins Twitter by bashing reporters, protesters.

In a Week of Horrible, Awful, Totally Depressing Tweets, Trump’s Most Popular One Will Surprise You

In a Week of Horrible, Awful, Totally Depressing Tweets, Trump’s Most Popular One Will Surprise You

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The Slatest
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March 25 2016 12:49 PM

This Week’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings

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Donald Trump speaks to guest gathered at Fountain Park during a campaign rally on March 19, 2016 in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

Ralph Freso/Getty Images

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

Hello and welcome back to Slatest’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings. Above, you’ll find our handy interactive of the past 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 further ado:

1.) Donald Trump (Last week: 1):

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2.) Bernie Sanders (2):

3.) Ted Cruz (4):

4.) Hillary Clinton (3):

5.) John Kasich (5):

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Double Winner: Trump

As usual, Trump topped both of our rankings this week. What was a little bit of a surprise, though, was that the GOP front-runner's top tweet wasn't his headline-grabbing response to the Brussels terror attacks or even his attempts to mock Ted Cruz for not having a trophy wife. Instead, it was about a more timeless topic when it comes to Trump: his hatred of the media and the protesters who dare to disagree with him.

Don't Forget About Ted

With her eyes on November, Clinton has begun to focus her attention on Trump, the man she'll most likely face in the general election. But let's not forget that Ted Cruz managed to carve out an even more aggressively Islamophobic position than Trump, saying the nation should "empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." The Texan's plan was intentionally short on specifics, but it came with a clear message—as far as he’s concerned, it’s not a question of if an American neighborhood with Muslims in it turns to terror, it's a question of when.

Forget About John

Kasich remains the forgotten man in the GOP race, and for good reason. Take Tuesday's primary in Arizona, where the Ohio governor finished behind Marco Rubio, aka a man no longer running for the Republican nomination.

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

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