Rand Paul tweeted and announced on Facebook that he is indeed the first of the current 2016 Presidential candidates to reach and exceed 2 million Facebook likes. I checked and he is correct. Of course, we all know that just because someone “likes” your Facebook page or follows you on Twitter that they actually like or would vote for you. What some people don’t know-and I’m not saying Rand Paul did this-but you can purchase Facebook likes. To Rand Paul’s credit-and the post was up for several hours before I noticed it, so it could have been scrubbed-it looked like he had far fewer haters on his feeds than, say, Mike Huckabee (twitter and facebook) or Rick Perry. Honestly, their campaign managers are doing poor jobs.
I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of candidates and their Facebook page likes and Twitter followers to see if it correlated with their actual popularity and how they rate in the polls. If they had more than one Facebook page or Twitter feed I chose the largest one. Here is what I found:
Facebook Likes, ranked highest to lowest, as of 6/6/2015 at 12:00 noon PST:
Rand Paul 2,001,351
Mike Huckabee 1,743,185
Donald Trump 1,676,894
Ben Carson 1,488,172
Ted Cruz 1,249,186
Rick Perry 1,183,243
Bernie Sanders 1,172,389
Marco Rubio 874,937
Hillary Clinton 871,615
Jeb Bush 178,165
George Pataki 111,845
Carly Fiorina 60,172
For Twitter followers, ranked highest to lowest, as of 6/6/2015 at 12:30pmPDT:
Hillary Clinton 3,620,000
Donald Trump 2,940,000
Marco Rubio 744,000
Rand Paul 627,000
Ted Cruz 451,000
Carly Fiorina 369,000
Mike Huckabee 368,000
Ben Carson 353,000
Bernie Sanders 352,000
Rick Perry 291,000
Jeb Bush 193,000
There are all kinds of polls that show varying outcomes of who would likely win the Presidency were the election to happen today.
I chose the results of the PPP polls since it wasn’t area-specific nor typically not biased, say, like Fox “News” polls.
Against Republican candidates they show Hillary Clinton up by 10 points over Marco Rubio and Ben Carson, 11 points over Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, 12 points over Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, 13 points over Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry, and 15 points over Chris Christie.
For the Republican nomination they show Scott Walker leading by 5 points over the next closest Republican candidate, Marco Rubio.
For the Democratic nomination they show Hillary Clinton 50 points over the next closest Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders.
It should be interesting to see how each candidate’s reach and message evolved throughout the campaign and how social media plays a role in this election cycle.
NOTE: As of the original writing of this story, I was not able to track down how much each candidate has raised thus far. And that’s unfortunate since it will be a huge factor in the outcome.
