Though the direct impact social media has on an election is up for debate, new data shows that Donald Trump is winning the battle on Twitter.
A new interactive chart from Twitter shows the presumed Republican presidential nominee has received the greatest share of the national conversation on the social media platform relative to all of his opponents from the the first full week of September 2015 until the end of last week.
The only one instance when Trump didn’t command the Twitter conversation was around an Oct. 13 Democratic debate in which Bernie Sanders got the most buzz.
Sanders and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton have consistently battled for the No. 2 and No. 3 most talked about candidate spots, the chart also reveals. A circle indicates when each candidate from either the Republican or Democratic Party dropped from the 2016 race.
“Twitter is the live pulse of the 2016 presidential election, and we’ve been crunching the numbers to show how the race has unfolded so far,” Miguel Rios, a data science manager for Twitter, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
