Comedian Rob Delaney is really good at tweeting. Like, really good. A relative unknown when he joined Twitter in 2009, Delaney has amassed a following half a million strong and counting, and was recently named “funniest person on Twitter,” beating out Aziz Ansari and Stephen Colbert for the honor.

Twitter has been something of a career-maker for Delaney, his tweets are some of the most popular and most retweeted on the network. He’s hilariously and brutally incisive. And his favorite target is Mitt Romney.

Delaney’s tweets about Romney are so widely discussed and get so many retweets that Bloomberg Businessweek felt compelled to commission a study from social media analytics company VoterTide to see how Delaney’s influence on the Mitt Romney brand stacks up compared to Romney himself.

VoterTide measured the number of total Romney mentions in June and found that “Delaney’s were the most popular 44 percent of the time. On days when the real Romney took the top spot, Delaney was often second. And third. ‘Much of the time, his followers are pushing his message further and connecting with people better than Romney himself is doing.”

What’s more, he’s doing it with fewer followers—@MittRomney has just under 800,000 (though there’s some speculation that some of these are fake, purchased followers) while @RobDelaney has just over 520,000.

So there you have it: Mitt Romney, himself a multi-deca-millionaire, and with all of his campaign fundraising and SuperPAC financiers like Sheldon Adelson (committed to personally spending up to $1 billion if necessary), is losing the conversation on Twitter three months before the election to Rob Delaney, a comic who two years ago was “trolling in the comedy salt mines” according to Businessweek, and doing telemarketing for Investor’s Business Daily.

Is anything so gratifying as seeing a guy like Rob ascend by standing on the shoulders of a guy like Mitt?

[Atlantic]