NOM's Champions of Marriage: the Twitter Wars

Since National Organization for Marriage- the group the Knights of Columbus officers send huge checks to on nights when they get drunk and angry watching The O'Reilly Factor down at the K of C HQ- decided to pick its Champions of Marriage in the GOP presidential stakes (all you have to do is be a Republican and sign their pledge to legalize as much antigay discrimination as you can), we've been tracking the Fearless Four. Mostly we use the Real Clear Politics average of all the weekly polls, but we also look at other measures of the Champions' prowess with voters.

Salon does a weekly update on the candidates based on their Twitter rankings.

This week, Ben Carson (#4 last week) won the week with his amazing, soup to nuts run of crazy:

Single Tweet Winner: Ben Carson

Viewed in a vacuum, Carson’s #IamaChristian tweet—a reference to last week’s shooting in Oregon, where the gunman allegedly asked his victims whether they were Christian before he shot them—could generously be seen as an act of solidarity with anyone who has been persecuted for his or her religion. Viewed in light of the rest of Carson’s comments on the matter, though, the tweet looks like one more display of empty, counter-factual bravery from a man who seems to believe that the mass shooting would have played out differently if he would have been there to help take down the gunman, and that Jews would have beaten the Nazis if only they had been armed.

Ted Cruz is stuck at 5th place. Santorum collapsed, from 9 to 15, and Jindal jumped from 14 to 12. You can see their winning tweets here.