More Kansans like Brownback’s Facebook page than Davis’

More Kansans have liked Gov. Sam Brownback’s candidate page on Facebook than that of his Democratic rival, Paul Davis. But far more Kansans have been talking about the Democrat on the social media network.

Facebook is tracking how often its users talk about candidates this year with an election dashboard.

Davis has received 29,900 likes on Facebook compared to Brownback’s 34,400. If those were votes it would put the governor ahead of Davis by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent.

But more people are talking about Davis: 10,700 Kansas users have mentioned him in comments in the past three months, which is more than 6,000 more than Brownback.

“It’s not necessarily predicative. But we’re interested looking at engagement statistics like that,” said Andy Stone, a policy representative for Facebook. “It shows you the number of people who are engaged with that candidate that are having conversations about that candidate on Facebook. They’re taking an additional step beyond just liking that page to actually converse about him.”

Stone said the social media network was not tracking whether the comments were positive or negative, but added that it shows Davis’ candidacy is on people’s minds.

Both campaigns have been aggressively using social media as a way to spread their messages.

In the race for U.S. Senate, independent Greg Orman has 22,800 likes compared to U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts’ 15,100, which gives Orman a 61 percent compared to Roberts’ 38 percent. There also 4,800 people in the state who have commented on Orman, more than twice that of Roberts.

The dashboard also allows comparisons of the engagement of Kansans with Facebook users in other states.

In neighboring Colorado, where there also races for governor and U.S. Senate, only 2,400 people have liked incumbent Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and only 8,300 people have liked Republican challenger Bob Beauprez, far below the totals for Brownback and Davis even though Colorado has a larger population.

Nationwide, Stone said, 22 million users had either liked or commented on a candidate running in the midterm elections in the past three months.

This story was originally published October 26, 2014 at 12:09 PM with the headline "More Kansans like Brownback’s Facebook page than Davis’."