Early voters are supporting Trump on social media
Initial reporting is showing a lead for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in early voting, but that trend hasn't made it to Twitter, where the majority of hashtags supporting GOP candidate Donald Trump far exceed those for Clinton.
A Vocativ analysis of over 126,000 posts containing early voting hashtags since September 23, the first day of formal early voting in several states, showed far greater use of pro-Trump hashtags, such as #MAGA. Moreover, Vocativ found that users posted three times as many pro-Trump hashtags as pro-Clinton hashtags.
Badly trailing on the social media sphere, Clinton is enjoying a significant lead of 15 percentage points over Trump among early voters, say news reports. That's around 19 million American voters so far.
At the same time, the most popular partisan hashtag found in our analysis, which looked at hashtags such as #EarlyVoting, #IVoted, and #IVotedEarly, among others, was #ImWithHer, posted 8,218 times. The next was #MAGA, an acronym for the Trump campaign slogan "Make America Great Again," which was used in 7,550 tweets. In all, Vocativ found more than 52,000 tweets employing pro-Trump hashtags like #TrumpTrain and #DrainTheSwamp, compared to just over 17,000 pro-Clinton tweets using hashtags like #EarlyVote4Her and #StrongerTogether.
Internet enthusiasm may not necessarily translate into real votes. Clinton's Democratic rival Bernie Sanders also consistently outpaced Clinton in hashtags and other online activity during the primaries, but in the end Clinton won both a majority of states and the popular vote.
The post On Twitter, Early Voters Are Backing Trump appeared first on Vocativ.
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