Hello and welcome back to Slatest’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings. Due to a technical glitch, we’re missing the usual handy interactive that we normally run each week, so we’ll have to make due with our tried-and-true method of ranking each candidate’s single most successful tweet of the past seven days.
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!
- 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:2)
2.) Bernie Sanders (1):
3.) Hillary Clinton (3):
4.) Ted Cruz (4):
5.) John Kasich (5):
Twitter Winner: Trump
If history is any guide, Trump would have easily won the overall RT crown this week if the interactive hadn’t conked out on us. Instead, he’ll have to live with yet another win in the single tweet category. The National Border Patrol Council endorsement actually came last Wednesday, but Trump’s winning tweet arrived this past Friday just after the buzzer sounded on the previous week’s rankings.
Actual Winners: Sanders and Cruz
Bernie and Ted won the week’s only major delegate-awarding contests. Cruz’s Wisconsin victory was great news for the Texan and the #NeverTrump movement, and further narrows Trump’s already narrow path to the GOP nomination. Sanders’ win in the Badger State, meanwhile, offered significantly less of a boost to his own attempt to unseat his front-running rival.
Some Unsolicited Advice: For John Kasich
If you’re going to try to eat an Italian restaurant out of food in the name of free media, you might as well live-tweet it. Instead, the Ohio governor went the understated route, and few of his followers noticed.
Hey, at least he got a sandwhich named in his honor.
