Beltway insiders like to dismiss Donald Trump’s strength in social media as a mirage – a following of reporters and political gadflies, not Republican voters and core activists.

New data shows the Washington elite are wrong.


According to an analysis obtained by POLITICO that matches Twitter handles to public voter data, seven out of every 10 of @realdonaldtrump’s followers appear to be his supporters. The report, produced by San Antonio database marketing agency Stirista, also found that nearly 90 percent of Trump’s followers are reliable turn outs at the ballot box; roughly 11 percent of Trump’s followers should be classified as first-time presidential voters.

“It’s translating into votes,” Stirista CEO Ajay Gupta said in an interview to describe Trump’s social media strategy. “Not at a one-to-one level. But at a 70 percent level, it is a pretty good margin.”

Stirista’s analysis tries to grapple with the still difficult-to-measure effect of social media on Election Day results amid one of the most engaging online presidential races in U.S. history, and one that, thanks to Trump, has upended traditional White House campaign practices.

Over the last year, Trump has skimped on data, policy and press communications in favor of a prolific and controversial series of tweets and Facebook posts. In terms of dollar value, it’s an obvious move for a decades-long celebrity like Trump who can essentially declare his opinions for free in short 140-character bursts that are often full of braggadocio, insults and incorrect information, but which prove to be too juicy for the media to ignore.

A report released Tuesday by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that Trump garnered the largest share of mainstream press coverage among his White House rivals in 2015. Those clips, the study found, did not square with the Republican’s early status as a dark horse, poorly-polling candidate.

According to the latest estimates from the Portland, Ore.-based analytics firm mediaQuant, Trump has amassed more than $3.4 billion in free media coverage over the last year thanks to all of the mentions of his name on television, in newspapers, magazines, online sites, blogs and social media. That figure includes more than $372 million in free media from his Twitter mentions alone, including a $211 million burst just in May fueled by his securing the GOP nomination, as well as a picture that he posted during Cinco de Mayo of himself eating a taco bowl and declaring, “I love Hispanics!”

For comparison, Hillary Clinton has gotten $1.4 billion in free media over the last year but only $93 million through her mentions on Twitter, mediaQuant found.

As Trump shifts from the GOP primary fight to a general election against Clinton, he doesn’t appear to be making any changes to his social-first strategy. While he’s leaning on the Republican National Committee for technical help to build voter and small-dollar donor databases, his Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other accounts remain a top priority at Trump Tower.

And the numbers keep suggesting what Trump is doing is working. Just look at the political conversation over the last 72 hours since the massacre in Orlando – Trump has dominated the news cycles through a series of tweets that have racked up more than a hundred thousand likes and retweets, plus more than 1 million comments, shares and likes from a handful of new Facebook posts.

One item alone, the Republican’s seven-paragraph statement posted Sunday night to Facebook, where he repeated an earlier call for President Barack Obama to resign because he wouldn’t blame the attacks on ‘radical Islam,’ didn’t need much time to become the second most popular item on Facebook for the entire 2016 presidential campaign, according to an analytic tracking tool run by BuzzSumo. The only thing ahead of it? His taco bowl lunch pic.

Trump’s critics have blasted his latest social media barrage tied to Orlando, calling it an exercise in opportunism. “His arrogant and incoherent missives wreak of self-interest and incompetence,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic consultant at Global Strategy Group, which works for the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA. But others insist that Trump is spot on in his assessments. And he’s only channeling his personality with the tools available to him, allowing him to showcase his commentary to a base of supporters that appreciates his authentic display of tough leadership.

“It’s some of the best in the party,” one top GOP tech strategist said. “As many people as it’s pissing off, it’s turning people on.”

Trump’s unprecedented social media approach is also seen by digital natives on both sides of the aisle as a risky way to run for the White House, even if it did work to his advantage over the last year as he beat out 16 rivals for the GOP nomination, some of which were well funded and better equipped with the kinds of sophisticated data tools that Obama used in his two presidential campaigns.

“It can work when you’re talking to a more niche audience,” said Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina-based digital operative who worked for Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. “But whenever you’re talking to a broader audience in the general, saying those controversial things is going to piss off the people you need to talk to.”

“He’s going to find that the general election Twitter is a lot less friendly to him then Republican primary Twitter,” added Teddy Goff, Clinton’s lead technology adviser.

While Trump’s campaign declined comment for this story, the candidate has explained some of what he’s up to. Back in 2012, as his Twitter account approached 2 million followers, Trump boasted on the site, “It's like having your own newspaper.”

Appearing earlier this year during a CNN town hall, Trump told host Anderson Cooper that he often just yells out what he wants to see tweeted “to one of the young ladies who are tremendous” working in his office. ”I’ll just shout it out and they’ll do it,” Trump said. “But during the evenings, after 7 o’clock or so, I will always do it by myself.”

Social media’s very nature means Trump’s commentary is instantly able to travel well beyond his immediate band of followers. Stirista analysis – a deep dive that cross referenced Twitter handles with the company’s national database of more than 154 million names and other public records -- is nonetheless helpful in detailing who some of the people are on the direct receiving end of the Republican’s missives.

Trump’s followers don’t exactly break hard along party lines: While about 44 percent are registered as Republicans, 32 percent were tagged as Democrats and the other 24 percent didn’t affiliate with either party.

On several fronts, the Trump and Clinton followers share similar characteristics. About 60 percent of the followers for both presumptive major party nominees were 45 or older. And roughly the same proportion of their followers have finished college (37 percent), while a little more than a fourth of each’s followers earn more than $100,000 a year.

There were also some obvious differences too. Clinton has more Democrats than Republicans following her, 60 percent versus about 18 percent. More than three quarters of Trump’s followers are white, while Clinton has more black and Hispanic followers. Clinton’s followers were far more likely to support gun control, Obamacare and loosening immigration restrictions, though a third of Trump’s followers also can be categorized as pro-choice, while nearly a quarter support gay marriage.

With the general election just getting started, Clinton and Trump are going full bore in their online attacks. The Democrat last week had her most prolific tweet ever when she urged Trump to “delete your account” after he’d just slammed Obama’s endorsement of her. But it’s Trump’s hands-on style that has made the biggest waves. It’s a marked contrast to the Mitt Romney 2012 model, which, according to his digital director during the last presidential campaign, involved the “best tweets ever written by 17 people.”

Daniel Kreiss, the University of North Carolina journalism professor who conducted a 2012 social media autopsy examining the Romney and Obama tech approaches, said Trump has found his niche in a forum that rewards authenticity. “Twitter,” he said, “is a perfect medium for him to channel that.”