Which Republican candidates have the smartest, dumbest and most devoted commenters?

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Especially in a primary campaign, there are a lot of different ways to measure public opinion. There’s money, of course, which while being an inaccurate measure of support remains the clearest indicator of campaign viability. There’s public opinion polling, which is useful if you want to know who would win if the election were held today but not very useful if you want to know who is likely to win the election months down the road. There are endorsements, an elite measure of public opinion that is both a lagging and leading indicator of candidate performance — elected officials endorse candidates they think will win, and then they help them win.

But what about online discourse? Until recently, it’s been difficult to measure, but research released today gives us some hints as to which candidates are loved, hated, talked about the most and relatively unknown.

Researchers used a tool they call Diffbot to collect data on over 300 million comments between July 1st and 20th on articles mentioning Republican primary candidates, analyzing them for length, affect, reading level and so on. From there, they were able to draw inferences as to which candidates have the most support, which have the most devoted followings and whose commenters may have skipped 9th grade English class.

Computer via Shutterstock

The candidates with the most overall mentions in comments were, in order, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Donald Trump. Anecdotally, Paul’s high rank on this metric makes sense; readers of this site can attest to what seems like a rapid-response team of libertarians who are ready to pounce on any article that mentions him in either a positive or negative light. So just because Paul generates a lot of chatter doesn’t mean he has the most support; his high volume of comments could easily be coming from a relatively small population of commenters.

To go along with comment volume, Diffbot also measured comment length, which can be used as a proxy for how passionate commenters are. On this metric, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie came in with the highest ranking. One could venture a number of guesses as to why comments mentioning these candidates were as high as they were: Rubio has a complicated record that his supporters may feel the need to defend at length. Christie could be the subject of angry tirades from New Jersey voters who can’t believe he’s running in the first place. Mike Huckabee’s supporters could be quoting Scripture at length. And so on.

Carly Fiorina comes in fourth in average comment length, but first in comment affect. Of course, that would matter much more if she didn’t come in last in comment volume. Very few people are talking about Carly Fiorina, but the few people who are seem to be wondering why more people aren’t. Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham rate the next highest on net support/opposition in comments that mention them, suggesting that commenters don’t find the need to punch down against lesser-known candidates.

However, once a candidate gets high enough in the polls, their detractors start to take notice. Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and Donald Trump — in that order — came in with the most negative average comment. These candidates have been getting lots of coverage on liberal sites (like this one), and Christie, Bush and Trump all have reasons for hard-line conservatives to react negatively to them, as well.

Perhaps the most interesting finding, however, is the relative reading level of comments mentioning each of the candidates, with Christie, Fiorina, Huckabee, Rubio and Rick Santorum having average comments at a ninth grade reading level; and with Ben Carson, Cruz, Paul and Trump having commenters at the seventh grade level. Some of the pattern here could be explained by the sites on which the candidates are being written about; Christie and Fiorina, for example, get more regional coverage with more highly-educated, niche audiences in New Jersey and California. However, especially at the bottom of the list, the commenter reading level lines up with what we already understood on an anecdotal level. The dumbest political conversations on the Internet right now are conversations about Donald Trump.

You can see the full report for yourself here.

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