Twitter Primary: Bernie Sanders Has The Most Real Followers While 57% Of Christie’s Are Fake

Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:44 pm

Bernie Sanders has the highest percentage of people following him on Twitter (93%) while 57% of Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie’s followers are fake accounts.

Spokeo ranked the candidates in terms of who is winning the Twitter primary, “If the primary was held on twitter, the contest would be between Hillary Clinton ( 3.81 million followers) versus Donald Trump (3.11 million followers). The contest might be even closer, using twitteraudit.com – we find that a full 35% of Hillary’s followers are fake followers (based on Twitter Audit’s metrics – number of tweets, date of last tweet, ratio of followers to friends – but this may be a hold over from the last campaign and previous followers). On the Republican side, Chris Christie fares even worse with 57% of his followers being fake.”

A Twitter audit of the Twitter account for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders revealed that the Senator from Vermont has the highest percentage of real people following his account. 93% of Sanders followers are real. Donald Trump is second at 90%. Jeb Bush is third at 89%, but Bush has one of the smaller Twitter footprints of any major candidate. The rest of the Republican field is bunched in the mid to low 80s, with the exception of Scott Walker, who is at 79%.

Hillary Clinton’s 65% authentic ratio is most likely a byproduct of a lot of left over accounts following her from her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination, and her high-profile status which will attract every spammer and bot on Twitter to her account.

The Twitter audits revealed that most of the Republican field is bunched together, as only Trump, Rubio, and Paul have a Twitter presence that stands out from the pack. On the Democratic side, it is Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and nobody else.

The big takeaway is that Bernie Sanders is proving to be just as authentic on Twitter as his support has been in the polls, while outside of a racist reality TV star, the Republican field is indistinguishable lump.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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