It’s Super Tuesday (and Mardi Gras) so I figured I’d take a look at some of the trends circulating around presidential nominees on Facebook. Rather than sitting around waiting for the polls to close, I decided to use the totally scientific method (not really) of making deductions based on the number of supporters each of them have on Facebook.

Here is the list of contenders organized by their number of supporters on Facebook:

The Stats

So what does this tell us?

A total of 682,189 Facebook users have declared their support for a candidate. With more than 64 million registered users, that means that 1.06 percent of Facebook is willing to declare support for a candidate. But with (at least) more than 15 million users outside of the US, that isn’t the greatest gauge of anything.

However, of the total 682,189 people pledging support we can assume that at least a high number of them are US citizens. With 375,029 supporters, Barack Obama commands 54.9 percent of the people choosing to participate on Facebook. The total number of supporters held by all of the other candidates is 307,160 giving him almost 70,000 more declared Facebook supporters.

We get it, Obama is popular on Facebook, but what does that mean?

Well according to Facebook more than half of its users are outside of college and its fastest growing demographic is users 25 and older. So using the powers of deduction, we can see that Obama isn’t just a college fad. With Facebook representing many demographics, Obama’s support is broad.

Alright, enough about Obama. What about the others?

The most curious factor here is the huge support for Ron Paul. While John McCain is precariously the Republican front-runner, Ron Paul wields almost double McCain’s number of supporters. Paul, who hasn’t won a single state in the primaries is inching close to the number of supporters Hillary has on Facebook.

This says that Paul has wide appeal among Independents and Democrats. The fact that he holds 82,369 supporters could indicate that he’d be a solid running mate for whoever ends up with the Republican nod.

So does any of this really mean anything?

It’s hard to say. What we know is that each supporter does represent one actual, living person. So based on that evidence we can say that this all means something, the question is what? Unfortunately, the answer to that question remains unclear to me. Anyone care to chime in?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, presidential, election 2008, statistics, demographics, elections

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