If you were to get all of your news last month from Twitter (and, well, maybe you did), you might reasonably conclude that the Democrat to beat in 2020 is none other than a 37-year-old Indiana mayor with a knack for linguistics and a tongue-twister of a name. According to the social media monitoring service Crowdtangle, Pete Buttigieg got the most interactions on Twitter of any Democratic candidate over the past 30 days. But if you were to take just one glance at how much cash each Democratic candidate has---a time-honored proxy for figuring out who the front-runner is---you would see that same name, Pete Buttigieg, way down toward the bottom of the list of 2020 contenders.

That stands to reason, of course. The candidate with the biggest bank account, Senator Bernie Sanders, declared his candidacy long before Buttigieg and already had a robust list of donors from his 2016 presidential run. The second richest, Senator Elizabeth Warren, transferred more than $10 million from her senate race, and former Maryland congressman John Delaney donated nearly $12 million of his own money to his campaign.

And yet it's hard to ignore the glaring gap between Buttigieg's success on Twitter and the other, more tangible metrics, like money, that have traditionally framed the presidential horse race. The disparity raises a distinctly modern question about campaigning in the social media age: What value does a candidate's internet stardom have?

Issie Lapowsky covers the intersection of tech, politics, and national affairs for WIRED.

The biggest problem with answering that question is that there's limited data to work with. Twitter, after all, is just 12 years---or precisely three presidential cycles---old. We know that at least one president masterfully used it during his campaign to circumvent the press, drive the news cycle, and command more coverage than all of his competitors combined. But Donald Trump was already far more famous than anyone he was running against, making it a little unfair to compare his dominance on social media to that of unknown candidates like Buttigieg or, say, Andrew Yang, both of whom rose out of relative obscurity to become darlings of the internet.

As The Upshot recently pointed out, there are ample stats indicating that Democrats on Twitter do not, in fact, represent the broader Democratic electorate. Off of social media, the Democratic Party is more moderate and less news-obsessed, while the Democratic Twitterati are more white, more college-educated, and more active in protests and political fund-raising.

A cursory comparison between candidates' overall funding and their popularity online would seem to suggest that viral success on Twitter is a weak proxy for the health of a campaign overall. That is, with the exception of Senator Kamala Harris, who excels at both.

By comparison, popularity on Facebook hews a bit more closely, though still not exactly, to the fund-raising stats. Facebook also has a much larger user base than Twitter.

So, does this mean that Buttigieg and other candidates who take off on Twitter ought to be written off as creatures exclusively of the internet's chattering class? Not necessarily. All that online conversation may indicate who the most viable candidates are, as the first quarter fund-raising numbers show. With the exception of Yang (sorry, #YangGang), the top performers on Facebook and Twitter were also the top fund-raisers in the first quarter, which ended on March 31.