Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may be dominating social media, but a new study has revealed that a vast percentage of his online following is legally incapable of voting.
According to data collected by the social analytics company, Macromeasures, just 39.4 percent of the real estate mogul’s Twitter followers are members of the voting-eligible population, as first reported by Forbes.
The company analyzed a handful of GOP hopefuls, including Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Carly Fiorina. Among those Republican candidates, Trump carried the largest percentage of disenfranchised followers. In comparison, 95.7 percent of Fiorina’s Twitter followers could legally cast a ballot if the election were held tomorrow.
According to Forbes, Macromeasures used certain criteria to filter out followers located outside the U.S. and/or under the age of 18 when gathering its data. A spokesperson told Forbes that the company used spot checks to ensure that individuals who were filtered out were indeed unlikely to be American and thus, unable to vote.
“The analysis also found that Trump’s following is weak among women, young conservatives and people with strong Christian values,” Forbes reported.
Just 28.4 percent of the bombastic billionaire’s followers are women and 11.5 percent are users with strong Christian values. Meanwhile, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a top evangelical candidate, leads the pack with just over 37 percent of his followers having communicated Christian values on Twitter while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio carries the most female followers, 43.7 percent, and college students, 14.4 percent.
Trump also lags behind in the number of followers he’s attracted who hail from early primary states. According to the study, only 0.9 percent of the New York businessman’s followers are located in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Despite trailing behind some GOP candidates with his following across certain demographics, Trump maintains the greatest online reach of any Republican candidate with 3.72 million Twitter followers — due in no small part to his celebrity status.
According to his Twitter profile, Trump joined the popular social networking site in 2009 — the same year NBC relaunched the format of his television series, “The Apprentice,” to include celebrity contestants. The business tycoon began building up his online following as a public figure long before entering the 2016 presidential race and presumably attracting more political folk.
Nevertheless, the 16 other Republican candidates still stagger behind Trump in terms of their online reach. The business tycoon has more than four times as many followers as Rubio, the GOP candidate with the second largest following on Twitter, and is less than half a million followers shy of tying with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
