Ben Carson can only hope Facebook "likes" were officially counted as Republican Party primary votes.

For what it's worth, ESPN-owned portal FiveThirtyEight finds the retired neurosurgeon overcoming his actual last place finish in the last two GOP primaries to best official party front-runner and South Carolina winner Donald Trump in the so-called "Facebook Primary," where "likes" count as votes.

Data also shows Carson outshining his rivals by attracting a wide stretch of social media support that spreads across pretty much the entire country and displays none of the geographical barriers all of other his opponents seem restricted by.

Carson Holds off Trump

To compile their information, computational journalist Matthew Conlen and visual journalist Reuben Fischer-Baum analyzed Facebook data beyond simple likes of a single page. Such an approach rendered Trump's apparent 5,756, 921 to 5,074, 982 "likes" lead off-base and insignificant.

"Discrepancies can be caused by candidates having multiple Facebook pages," said Conlen. "For example, Bernie Sanders has an official page for his position as a senator and an official page for his presidential campaign. For cases like these we aggregate the amount of total likes for the candidate across the pages and de-duplicate so that if a person likes both of Sanders' Facebook pages this will only be counted once."

Sanders Tops Clinton 3-1 in 'Likes'

With data commutated in such a way, Bernie Sanders places second overall among all candidates and tops Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's level of support by nearly a 3-1 margin. Meanwhile, Trump attracts more support than chief GOP rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined.

Roughly, 58 percent of all American adults use Facebook, though researchers warn the share is not a representative of the country at large. Users are disproportionately young, low-income and female.

In the case of the "Facebook Primary," the sample may be even further skewed by such variables as only some people on Facebook have liked a presidential candidate's page and because those pages haven't existed for the same amount of time.

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