After a surprise fifth place finish, Rand Paul dropped out the Presidential race. My scrapings suggested that Paul had a strong Twitter presence, something that could actually mean something if connected with the result in Iowa. That is a big ‘could.’

Money definitely matters. Paul had little of it, with his campaign running with just over one-million and the super-pac with just over four. This is not a well capitalized operation. Paul never caught the support level of his father, no wild-eyed ground game was behind him.

On the ground in Kentucky, he faces a primary and then a strong democratic challenger from Lexington. Kentucky Republicans delivered on their promise to cut “Obamacare” by ending the state’s extremely popular Kynect program. Combined with growth in Lexington and Louisville and the polarization of the Evangelical vote, it seems that the safe place for a Southern Libertarian may have become quite tight.

Paul had a fairly robust social media impact for a candidate with his fundamentals. It didn’t translate into a win. Trump has an outsized social media impact compared to Cruz, this translated into a near tie for third. Neither polls nor tweets effectively predicted the outcome. All measures are suspect.

Super Tuesday is less than a month away. There is no chance that any of these candidates will be effective in building a ground game in each state. The question is, will Paul voters head for any of the remaining candidates, or will they head toward Sanders as Penn and Teller recommend?

The Iowa Caucuses are tonight. My predictions on the basis of Twitter data from a time-bound (during the townhall) and space-bound (just Iowa) dataset.

Clinton and Sanders are running relatively even. There is a lot of Twitter heat for Sanders, although much of it comes through retweets. Methodologically, this is suspect given the use of Twitter as a transmit medium during media events. Much of the Twitter activity is at least topically about Clinton. The most popular Tweets seem to turn on reclaiming the name ‘socialist.’

The volume of Sanders re-tweets is difficult to process. Thousands of lines of my sample (100,000) are taken by the same tweets.  The near lack of meaningful user content is shocking, over these six months of research it seems like twitter is less democratic by the week.

The Republican ticket is more difficult to predict. In this dataset there is something striking – between the mass Sanders and Clinton retweets, there is a Republican: Rand Paul. Not Trump. Paul.