With the primaries behind us and national conventions around the corner, people around the world are sizing up the presumptive nominees for the 2016 Presidential Election. Between the news, the polls, and everybody screaming on social media, it seems safe to say the General Election is upon us. I was originally going to pull together some polling data to make my own predictions before I remembered polling data this far out from the election isn't very useful. Besides, we have enough wannabe pundits running around trying to be the next Nate Silver (maybe not Republican Primary Nate Silver); I feel something different is in order.

As you may have noticed, this year's election has been considerably different from any in recent memory. The last four candidates standing are:

A former reality TV star who systematically dismantled the republican party en route to securing the Republican nomination;

A religious senator who has figuratively fallen off the face of the earth since his campaign was very possibly meme-d to death;

A democratic front-runner viewed as heir to the throne who recently avoided an FBI indictment;

A socialist democratic runner-up bemoaning money in politics while smashing fundraising records.

Even more fascinating than the candidates themselves is how they got where they are today. I am convinced that without social media and various online communities, two out of these four candidates would never have contended in their respective primaries. From my perspective, the cults of personality on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have a far greater impact than traditional news sites. I find it strange that people get emotional over the occasional Daily Kos hit piece while ignoring the incredible impact the 9th most popular website in the United States* is having. Well, I have not been ignoring it. Today's study is about election coverage on Reddit; let's roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty!

Enter Google Big Query

Several weeks ago my friend and colleague Madds was helping me trawl publicly available data sources to help satiate my analytic cravings. It turns out that Google's Big Query service has a large number of public data sets available for users to query at will. One data set immediately caught my attention; a month-by-month extract of Reddit posting data. It turns out their analytic platform had all of Reddit's posting data from January to May 2016 neatly packaged into structured tables, ready to be queried.

So I queried them...a lot.

Daddy, What Did You Do During the Meme War?

The first burning question I had was a simple one: which candidate has the biggest fan club on Reddit? If you are even a casual Reddit user, you've almost certainly heard of /r/SandersForPresident(S4P) and /r/The_Donald. These are the online communities I mentioned in the previous segment that effectively boosted their anti-establishment candidates into the stratosphere.

It's tough to say which community had a more significant impact on their candidate. While both subreddits do a great job of rallying supporters, the subreddits had different approaches to community outreach. While S4P organized fundraising and phonebanking sessions, The_Donald took a much... simpler approach to promoting their candidate. They sh...ucks-posted a lot. What's that? You want to know just how much they "shucks-posted"?