February 12, 2016
Fresh off their big victories in the New Hampshire primaries, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are dominating the Keystone State -- on Facebook, at least.
A new analysis and interactive map from pollster Nate Silver's website FiveThirtyEight found which candidate has the most Facebook "likes" in each county across the country.
In Philadelphia County, Bernie Sanders is the clear leader, with a 40 percent share of all Facebook likes. Behind him is Donald Trump with 19 percent and Hillary Clinton with 16 percent.
Sanders also leads in Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties. Across the rest of the state -- sans Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Centre County, where Sanders also leads -- Trump is the likes winner.
In total, Trump is the leader with 28 percent of all likes in the state, and Sanders is second with 23 percent. The closest candidate after that is Ted Cruz with 10 percent.
The Commonwealth is similar to the rest of the country, as a look at the FiveThirtyEight map shows a scattering of Trump and Sanders counties. The exception is Texas, where the state's senator, Cruz, has a stronghold.
FiveThirtyEight warns that Facebook likes are not votes (obviously) and that its map is not indicative of how the election will play out, for a number of reasons:
...this share is not a representative sample of the country — Facebook users are disproportionately young (although not as young as users of other social media networks), low-income and female. And the sample may be even more skewed because only some people on Facebook have liked a presidential candidate's page and because those pages haven't existed for the same amount of time.
Trump is the leader among the GOP field in Pennsylvania, according to the latest poll from Franklin & Marshall College. In that survey, Sanders had shortened a wide gap between him and Clinton but still trailed her by a large margin.
FiveThirtyEight's interactive map is a fun time-waster for political nerds, and you can check it out here.
