Nowadays in democracies, Twitter seems to be playing a great role and whoever with the most Twitter followers simply wins the elections and consolidates after that. It’s almost a cent per cent record.
First take the case of US President Barack Obama (https://twitter.com/BarackObama). At around 75 million followers he is in a league of his own. But in 2008 he was a rank non-entity and he was supposed to stand absolutely no chance against Hillary Clinton. But Hillary wasn’t even on Twitter then and was soundly thrashed by Obama who debuted on Twitter in 2007 a year after its launch.
Obama thrashed Mitt Romney (https://twitter.com/MittRomney) who after being on Twitter for a good seven years is yet to cross the 2 million mark. This year’s US Presidential race saw no surprises too.
Hillary (https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton) beat Bernie Sanders (https://twitter.com/berniesanders) on Twitter by 7.2 million to 2.7 million. The same thing happened in the offline world and Hillary got the Democratic ticket.
Absolutely nobody gave Donald Trump a chance in the Republican race with many saying he wouldn’t even make it to the Top 5. But on Twitter he (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump) thrashes Ted Cruz (https://twitter.com/tedcruz) by 9.4 million to 1.3 million, again a no contest which played itself out in the offline world.
Now also the mainstream media is staunchly behind Hillary, but it is usually social media which proves to be the deciding factor in the end. Trump is way ahead on the Twitter count, so you can’t count him out!
The Number 2 global politician on Twitter is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) with 20.6 million followers. His rival Rahul Gandhi wasn’t even on Twitter. That also showed in the offline world when Modi’s BJP thrashed Rahul’s Congress by a whopping seat margin of 282-44 in the Parliamentary elections.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (@SBYudhoyono) has 9.1 million followers and he won his two Indonesian Presidential terms. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (@RT_Erdogan) has 8.5 followers and he has been Prime Minister/President of Turkey since 2003.
Premiers David Cameron of UK and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel were predicted by the mainstream media of losing their respective elections, but they won. Not surprisingly they are Twitter leaders in their political worlds.
Most of the politicians are national leaders, but regional head honcho and New Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) is biggie in the Twitter world with 8.1 million followers and that’s why he won 67/70 Assembly seats in the 2015 Delhi elections!
So whenever you want to watch a democratic election keep your eyes firmly on the Twitter followers of every leader, for it appears that the latest commandment is…
The leader with the most Twitter followers shalt win!
© Sunil Rajguru