Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if this has any special significance, but I think the number of FB/Twitter followers for the current frontrunners are interesting. I'll use Facebook numbers.

Hillary Clinton - 1.3 million

Jeb Bush - .26 million

Donald Trump - 3.7 million

Joe Biden - .85 million

Bernie Sanders - 1.4 million

Marco Rubio - .99 million

John Kasich - .14 million

Scott Walker - .36 million

Ben Carson - 2.88 million

No, I don't think that Donald Trump is the runaway favorite for president. On the other hand, a look at these would make Walker's collapse and Bush's struggles (despite a goliath $100 million warchest) less of a surprise than the political press has portrayed. Likewise, Sanders' challenge to Clinton would be less surprising.

Bush is the real surprise to me. Endorsements and dollars show that he's the establishment's pick, but people just aren't interested in the guy. It would be kind of amazing if someone went from having a D-list celebrity following to sitting in the oval office in a little over a year.

Pretty sure that a lot of people who hate Donald Trump are following him on social media because he's the most likely person to say something outrageous.

"people just aren't interested in the guy" isn't accurate - "people who use social media aren't interested in the guy" is. The candidates with low numbers on social media seem to also be the candidates whose supporters are less likely to be on social media.

I acknowledge that this is an imperfect, perhaps fatally flawed, metric - I'm sure it skews young, for example. Something I noticed after posting is that Rand Paul isn't on the linked list (and is barely holding on in polls), but has 2 million FB follows. But who knows, I could see him picking up as the fields starts winnowing.

But I think it's fair to characterize Jeb's numbers as indicative of low interest. There are a ton of people on Facebook in demographics that Jeb needs to do well in to win. To stereotype (using known statistics), white males in their 30's tend to vote Republican - there are plenty of those on Facebook and I see them "sharing" conservative links every day (and I can see that many have followed guys like Carson and Paul). In our increasingly "filter bubbled" world, I think we're seeing people aggressively tune out milquetoast establishment types (on the right at least).

Be careful with using social media followers/engagement as a metric, because it's an easily manipulated stat. According to some recent stories, a million of H Clinton's followers are fake or fakeish users, actually putting her closer to Jeb's actual number.

Also, with the increasing rise of sock puppetry, I would not be surprised to see these sort of artificially inflated numbers are not just organic, but a planned/hired out part of a public relations campaign.

Jeb is actually really unpopular with a lot of the Republican base. He gets booed when he's at conventions.

His strategy was to use his Wall St connections (he was working for Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt) to build a war chest capable of permanently damaging any other candidate in the race with negative ads. Essentially forcing Republican voters to make an early choice between accepting candidate Jeb Bush and getting president Hillary Clinton.

That drove most other candidates from the race, but Trump's entry has completely destroyed that strategy.

> That drove most other candidates from the race

Given the unusually crowded Republican field, that's hard to defend as consistent with reality. "Resulted in most of the other candidates that were seen as likely and viable by the mainstream establishment staying out of the race" is, perhaps, not as obviously contrary to reality.

If that's your metric, it's probably worth running them through a few filters to detect authenticity of their followers:

https://www.twitteraudit.com/

That site thinks I'm a fake, so I question the accuracy of its metrics.

I usually use SocialBakers, but it's down right now.

http://www.socialbakers.com/twitter/fakefollowercheck/

(OP) Good idea - FWIW the numbers look proportionately the same if filtered through that.

Interestingly, Hillary actually towers over Sanders in terms of authentic Twitter follows.

This filters based primarily on the 'activity' of the twitter account - maybe Sanders is more likely to convince someone to join twitter just to follow him...

Prediction markets often break Republican because there are a lot of rich idiots who want to see Republicans win.

(Maybe that is why there are so many Republican candidates. If you can pass all the litmus tests, you can get millions of dollars to pay your friends to do things for you -- between the Koch brothers and the rest of them you can get a lot of free money if you are a Republican. I think Trump thinks he can make money off the publicity, which is a different business model.)

Not just paying friends, but things like selling books etc.

If you campaign with free money you are basically marketing your book with free money.

Worth pointing out that Rand Paul has 2.06 million likes and he's polling at 2.7%.

Yeah, I noticed that after posting (he wasn't on the original list). My guess is that he's attracted a following of libertarian college students who pollsters probably (rightly) don't give much weight. Maybe he's an example of how flawed the metric is, but maybe he'll be surprisingly resilient as the field winnows.

Also, followers is a lagging indicator. If Donald Trump bows out of the race, he'll still have a ton of followers.

Paul was polling quite high at one point in 2014, but things changed since then (which is no surprise, 2014 is super early).

> My guess is that he's attracted a following of libertarian college students who pollsters probably (rightly) don't give much weight.

;_;

No really, why is it right to not give people like me much credence? Ron Paul made a lot of ground there.

Younger 'voters' don't show up on Election Day, it's a time honored tradition. They make a lot of noise online and then forget to pull the lever..

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/08/six-take-awa...

This is pretty interesting. Consider turning into a short blog post?

This is like comparing halloween mask sales volumes to who will be elected.

How many Trumps with that hair are going to be running around at the end of October?

I acknowledge that this could be completely invalid, but a Halloween mask sits in a closet, while a Facebook/Twitter follow can be (assuming the user or the algorithm don't bury it) more powerful than any campaign link to voters, well, ever.

They're already breaking rules of past elections where a "gaffe" would be endlessly regurgitated by news anchors until the candidate agreed to a heartfelt exclusive sit-down apology with some network. Trump (perhaps unwittingly) has figured out that the direct relationship of social media makes that irrelevant, and is taking full advantage by belittling his social media inferiors.

The candidates with good followings are basically getting free focus group testing - I wouldn't be surprised if Trump ran with immigration after floating dozens of wild causes and noticing that immigration had a particular resonance.

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