Retweets are not endorsements, and neither are Twitter followers. But if they were, President Donald Trump would be winning the Twitter primary.
Nineteen percent of adult Twitter users in the U.S. Follow @realDonaldTrump on Twitter, compared to 14 percent who follow one or more of his Democratic rivals, according to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Perhaps not surprisingly, more Republicans (31%) follow Trump than Democrats (13%). And those who follow Trump on Twitter are more likely to approve of his job performance (54% approval) than those who don’t (24%).
One defining characteristic of Trump’s tweets is that he often uses the social media platform to make inflammatory or controversial statements. Over the weekend and into Monday, for example, he let loose a torrent of posts going after four Democratic lawmakers of color, at one point suggesting that the women, all but one of whom was born in the U.S., should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
The Pew analysis is based on a representative sample of U.S.-based Twitter users and doesn’t include overseas, spam or bot accounts. Trump has 61.9 million Twitter followers in all. The top candidate for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has 9.4 million.
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