In Monday's post, Not The 12A Bump: Did "Bangkok Jeff" Backer's campaign buy his Facebook fan explosion? Bluestem reported that Backer appeared to be running an untargeted campaign to swell his social media profile:
Indeed, in his quest to replace the man he calls "Metro" Jay McNamar, Backer went from 78 Facebook "likes" during the week of January 24 throught January 30, 2014, to 389 between January 25 through January 31, 2014 (Facebook's charting, not Bluestem's) to a whopping 5215 likes during the period of January 26, 2014 though February 1, 2014, and peaked at 5729 "talking about this," according to data Facebook posts publicly; 5355 of the likes were very recent.
A few of his fans have unliked the page, so the count now rests at 5309.
We'd joked about the number of likes exceeding the population of several of the counties he represents, only to be properly admonishedby Gustavus elections genius Max Hailperin in a comment:
Regardless of the population of those particular counties, the district as a whole must have about 40k, the same as any other district - that's the way redistricting works. (However, it is unlikely that equal population was achieved by gerrymander so severe as to include Bangkok.)
As of 4:20 p.m today, the Jeff Backer campaign now has 9,699 Likes and as the new screenshot reveals, he's still big in Thailand. Not everyone who likes the page sticks with it, as 9,967 new likes have come in the last week, so nearly 300 fans, paid or unpaid, have left Backer behind.
But he's still big in Bangkok.
Screenshot: Jeff Backer's ginormous Facebook fanbase. Minnesota House District 12A is located in west central Minnesota, butting against the border of North and South Dakota. It includes Elbow Lake and Morris, but not Bangkok or any part of Thailand.
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