While nearly all of the primary election votes have yet to be counted, if the nominating process was held on Facebook the overwhelming winners would be Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Ben Carson.
Nate Silver’s website 538.com has crunched the numbers on Facebook “Likes” for each presidential candidate and produced a national map, county by county, that shows how the Facebook crowd views the field.
In a contest of Facebook Likes – not separated into Republican and Democratic categories — 538 found that Bernie Sanders would be on pace to beat Hillary Clinton nationwide by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. Carson would edge out Donald Trump, yet Trump would garner more support than Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined.
In Michigan, among the state’s most populous counties, Wayne, Oakland, Ingham and Kent follow the Sanders/Carson preference.
What’s more, several U.P. counties, plus Genesee County, give Sanders a substantial edge.
One outlier is Macomb County, where Trump slips past Carson, as Sanders stays well ahead of Hillary Clinton.
While Facebook Likes certainly do not predict election outcomes, they do reflect the enthusiasm and loyalty that individual candidates enjoy. It would appear that Carson’s current campaign doldrums contrast with the spontaneous, energetic support he engendered back in the fall when he was rising in the Iowa polls.
In contrast, Clinton is stuck in single digits across the state. The one big exception is Washtenaw County, where she managed 12 percent of the Likes.
Here’s how 538 sizes up the outcome:
Anything seems possible this year, but, still, be careful how you interpret these numbers: Facebook Likes are not votes.
According to the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of American adults use Facebook. But this share is not a representative sample of the country — Facebook users are disproportionately young (although not as young as users of other social media networks), low-income and female. And the sample may be even more skewed because only some people on Facebook have liked a presidential candidate’s page and because those pages haven’t existed for the same amount of time.
… Of course, Facebook isn’t claiming to be predictive — (but) Likes can still be a fun gauge of where candidates have support.
