Trump smiles during a campaign event at the Adler Theater in Davenport, Iowa, on Saturday. (Photo: Paul Sancya/AP)



On the eve of the first contest in the 2016 presidential race, the candidates are hoping to turn seemingly endless months of talk about their campaigns into actual votes.

And on Facebook, most people in Iowa are talking about Donald Trump.

According to data shared by the social network, more than 181,000 Iowans have referenced the Republican frontrunner in the last week — generating more than 727,000 “interactions” (likes, comments, posts or shares) about the brash billionaire’s presidential bid.

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Trump has received by far the most attention of any candidate in the race on Facebook — and considerably more than his closest GOP rival, Ted Cruz.

About 48,000 Iowans have referenced the Texas senator on Facebook over the last seven days, generating more than 155,000 interactions. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, with more than 21,000 Iowans referencing him on Facebook, is a distant third.

On the Democratic side, frontrunner Hillary Clinton and rival Bernie Sanders are neck and neck when it comes to Facebook mentions. Nearly 100,000 Iowans referenced the former secretary of state in the past week, accounting for more than 366,000 interactions, while more than 86,000 Iowans referenced the Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist, accounting for more than 335,000 interactions over the last seven days.

According to the Facebook data, the top five issues Iowans are most interested in are as follows:

1. Wall Street and financial regulation

2. Crime and criminal justice

3. Abortion

4. Taxes

5. The Affordable Care Act

The data released by Facebook should come with a big caveat, however: The figures do not take into account negative interactions, i.e. the number of posts mocking Trump or, say, bashing Clinton over her use of a private email server or her handling of Benghazi. And the data doesn’t appear to account for a candidate’s own Facebook presence. Trump, for example, has more than 5 million followers on Facebook — meaning anything posted on the former “Celebrity Apprentice” host’s Facebook wall is bound to get more shares than, say, Martin O'Malley’s status updates.

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Besides, Facebook popularity doesn’t necessarily equate to the trail. Despite national poll numbers in the low single digits, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul sits just behind Rubio in overall Facebook interactions (2.2 million in the last week, per Facebook data). And the libertarian appears to be a relatively popular Facebook topic in Iowa too.

But according to the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, Paul is the choice of just 5 percent of Republican Iowa caucusgoers.