The main reason I’ve been on the internet at all over the last couple of weeks is Baby Yoda. If we were beginning to think we’d seen the end of him though, this morning he crashed back on to our screens by drinking soup and being revealed as the frontrunner in the US 2020 election campaign.
A major way of tracking how a politician – or any public figure, really – is doing with the public is by seeing how many social media hits they get, and the sort of feedback left in the comments sections. The more clicks and comments you have, the better you’re generally doing.
(Unless you’ve majorly bombed out on a post, but that’s a whole other story.)
Between the 12th and 25th of November, some people at Axios kept track of how many interactions all the posts about different Democratic candidates got, and compared them to Baby Yoda. Bernie Sanders averaged 850 interactions on every post, 839 for Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg came in third with an average of 600 interactions per post.
Baby Yoda averaged 1,671.
Baby Yoda made his adorable debut to the world in the same week that former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick announced that they were going to join the race to the White House. Pretty massive news in the world of politics, and yet Baby Yoda still got ten times the attention they did.
I would even go so far as to bet that the comments on Baby Yoda posts are overwhelmingly positive (let’s be real, it’s mostly just me crying over him on my keyboard), whereas you basically need a hazmat suit if you’ve ever wanted to delve into the comments section of a politicians social media.
Baby Yoda hasn’t officially announced his run for the Presidency yet, but he absolutely has the support to get there. And if a billionaire without any political experience can make it to the White House, then so can a tiny, green 50 year old, and nobody can tell me otherwise.