This Week’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings.

The RNC Had a Pretty Great Comeback to Trump’s Colorado Complaints

The RNC Had a Pretty Great Comeback to Trump’s Colorado Complaints

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April 15 2016 2:58 PM

This Week’s 2016 Twitter Power Rankings

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Donald Trump speaks at the CFE Arena during a campaign stop on the campus of the University of Central Florida on March 5, 2016 in Orlando.

Joe Raedle/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.) Hillary Clinton (3)

4.) Ted Cruz (4)

5.) John Kasich (5)

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Double Winner: Donald Trump

Trump topped both standings, per usual. He spent much of the week complaining about last weekend's Colorado GOP convention, at which he walked away with zero delegates thanks, in part, to an incredibly weak ground game. The Republican Party, meanwhile, shot back on Friday. "The rules surrounding the delegate selection have been clearly laid out in every state and territory, and while each state is different, each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it," wrote RNC spokesman Sean Spicer. "It ultimately falls on the campaigns to be up to speed on these delegate rules. Campaigns have to know when absentee ballots are due, how long early voting lasts in certain states, or the deadlines for voter registration; the delegate rules are no different." (That "easy to understand" dig was a nice touch; the reference to knowing registration deadlines was an even better one.)

Non-Trump Winner: Bernie Sanders

Sanders continues to draw massive crowds on the campaign trail. All the excitement, though, can cause its own type of problems—particularly when his surrogates veer off message. Still, controversy aside, it's clear that Bernie has been far more successful framing the Democratic debate than seemed possible.  

And in Last Place, Online as in Life: John Kaisch

Kasich continues to bring up the rear in the Twitter race—just as he does in the actual one. (He still trails Marco Rubio on the delegate scoreboard. Woof.) The Ohio governor found his most success—a relative term—on social media this week thanks to a fortunate run in with an Ohio State football star, who has roughly 100,000 more followers than Kasich does, and was kind enough to toss the man a retweet.

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

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