On Twitter during late 2015 and early 2016, Donald Trump’s front-runner status was evident, even if it hadn’t yet fully sunk in with the tribunes of conventional wisdom. Trump’s following far outstripped his rivals. His tweets drove news cycles, and channeled the resentments of a furious base. In October 2015, The New York Times described Twitter as a “powerful bulwark” of support during a shaky moment in Trump’s campaign, noting that he was retweeted twice as often as Hillary Clinton and 13 times more than Jeb Bush. The platform helped make him president.

Yet when it comes to Democratic politics, Twitter is proving a lot less influential.

It’s not just that Twitter traffic doesn’t appear to reflect the priorities of the Democratic electorate. Spending too much time on the platform can be actively misleading about the state of the party, as you can see in the polling surge of Joe Biden, a man despised by the online left. Biden has fewer Twitter followers than the first-term congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and less than half as many as Senator Bernie Sanders.

He’s utterly at odds with the style of progressive politics that dominates the internet, failing to properly apologize for touching women in ways that made them uncomfortable, offering half measures on climate change, and praising “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.” But among Democratic voters, he is leading the field by double digits.

In some ways the digital disconnect is surprising. The Democratic Party has more young voters than Republicans do, and young people are more likely to be on Twitter. The party is supposed to be the more tech savvy one — it was progressive Democrats who coined the word “netroots.”