As U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris launches her bid for President, new data shows she is the third most powerful politician on Twitter, besting both former President Barack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
According to data assembled by CrowdTangle, a social media analysis tool, and published by Axios Harris gets more retweets and likes than every politician and political news handle bar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Donald Trump.
That prominence in social media could be a huge advantage to Harris as she launches her presidential campaign.
Social media presence correlates strongly with overall media coverage.
Presidential campaign veterans view a candidate’s proportion of media coverage, or “media share” as arguably the most important metric in determining who will win a nomination, and a general election.
According to Jeff Roe, former campaign manager for Sen. Ted Cruz during his presidential campaign run, the two most significant metrics are media share and small-dollar fundraising.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren may have an advantage over Harris on the small-dollar fundraising side, but she doesn’t even make it onto the CrowdTangle/Axios chart, indicating she might be worse-placed than Harris to take on and defeat Trump in 2020.
For her part, Ocasio-Cortez is still ineligible to run for President, given age requirements set out in the Constitution. But she is the only Democrat to outrank Harris as it stands.
