"This feels like 2008 all over again," as NPR reports [8] the latest Iowa Poll showed Sanders just 7 points behind Hillary Clinton, who leads 37 to 30 percent among likely Democratic caucus-goers. Why 2008? As NPR notes, that's when a heavily favored Clinton stumbled and lost to Barack Obama, then a young senator whose middle name, Hussein, was the same as a dictator the U.S. had just overthrown and whose last name rhymed with America's Public Enemy No. 1. And while the socialist septuagenarian continues to surge, Hillary faces yet another 'issue', as Yahoo Tech reports [9], 1 million (or one third) of her 'apparent' Twitter followers are fake.
[10]
As The Des Moines Register reports, [11]
Liberal revolutionary Bernie Sanders, riding an updraft of insurgent passion in Iowa, has closed to within 7 points of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race.
She's the first choice of 37 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers; he's the pick for 30 percent, according to a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll.
But Clinton has lost a third of her supporters since May, a trajectory that if sustained puts her at risk of losing again in Iowa, the initial crucible in the presidential nominating contest.
[12]
This is the first time Clinton, the former secretary of state and longtime presumptive front-runner, has dropped below the 50 percent mark in four polls conducted by the Register and Bloomberg Politics this year.
Poll results include Vice President Joe Biden as a choice, although he has not yet decided whether to join the race. Biden captures 14 percent, five months from the first-in-the-nation vote Feb. 1. Even without Biden in the mix, Clinton falls below a majority, at 43 percent.
[13]
"These numbers would suggest that she can be beaten," said Steve McMahon, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns dating to 1980.
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But Hillary's problems continue to rise as Yahoo Tech [9] finds that an analysis of the Hillary Clinton's and Joe Biden's Twitter accounts has revealed that over one million of Clinton's followers are fake, while only 53% of Biden's social media fans are real.
Fake Twitter followers abound among the U.S. presidential candidates as they gear up for the election in 2016. And Hillary Clinton isn’t the only candidate with more than a million of them. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump also has well over a million fake followers. Other candidates have them, too, but not as many (in large part because they don’t have as many followers, period).
“Fake followers are a mix of inactive Twitter users (who signed up but never log on), completely fake users that are created for the sole purpose of following people, and spam bots that are programmatically set up to tweet ads and malicious content,” explained David Caplan, co-founder of TwitterAudit.
“Fake followers aren’t inherently bad,” Caplan said, “they are just a dishonest form of using social media. They can be leveraged to inflate someone’s reputation. People will most likely follow someone who already has many followers, so buying followers is a way to boost your follower count in the future. Fake followers can also be used to commit fraud in the sense that you can inflate the value of your Twitter account for advertising purposes without creating any real value.”
Here are the "real" follower counts for the numerous presidential hopefuls...
[14]
