We live in a thrilling age. Planes zoom through the sky, Google keeps tabs on our every step, and what? A 15-year-old who legally changed his name to “Deez Nuts” in Iowa is not only running for President of the United States, but he’s polling at 9 percent and is somehow on the ballot in 30 states? At face value, there are so many problems with this social media phenomenon. For one, Iowa’s Brady Olson (the former identity of the elusive Deez Nuts) has 20 years until he can legally become president. Second, how does this high school sophomore go from playing baseball to headlining political news reports? Clearly, there’s no clout to this campaign. However, Mr. Nuts can boast nearly one-tenth of voter support in one of the most crucial states during election season.
The root question is: where did this support bloom from? Social media hype and the sheer hilarity of Deez Nuts’s candidacy was enough to commit a dangerously admirable amount of voter support. It would be easy to shrug this sensation off as an anomaly, or the ironic interjection of a meme into the political world. But, this crazy campaign represents a new kind of political accessibility; without the internet and social media platforms, Deez Nuts would have never reached that near 10 percent of voters in Iowa. What were those voters in Iowa truly saying? Were they indicating that they felt that Deez Nuts was truly the best candidate of all that have thrown their hat into the race? Or, were they flexing their political efficacy in an effort to use the power of their vote to make a statement? Either way, this small-scale poll may illuminate a much more grand statement about the support other candidates boast at this early stage of the 2016 election process.
From any political bias, the line of sight toward the hot mess that has been 2016 election hype has both confused and frustrated many voters. Our new political trends of crowdsourcing virtual support barely translates into voter poll numbers, while billions of dollars have already been spent to buy the support of the American people. While some candidates have used their experience as Washington insiders or have claimed to be champions for average Americans, others have used shock-value and hype-based campaigns tactics to temporarily captivate audiences. The candidacy of 15-year-old hopeful Deez Nuts is but a mere example of this kind of campaign, even though he can be ultimately rendered irrelevant by his obvious lack of Constitutional eligibility. The more dangerous campaign in this category can be exemplified by candidates like Donald Trump, whose eternally deep pockets and spitfire logic perpetuates the relevance of his campaign in the early polls that the news media have been projecting.
While history shows us that relevance does not typically translate into viability for political campaigns, the role of social media in this election makes the hype surrounding Trump that much more potent. In campaigns like these, experience, competence, and political platforms take a back seat to aggressively broadcasted pejorative statements and easily sharable controversies. The American public represents an infinitely captive audience, and the candidates that can most easily captivate the voting public show the most support on social media platforms. Will that online following translate to concrete numbers in the primaries? Only time will tell for that particular element of the election season. However, if we deny hype-based campaigns the power to mask their lack of qualification with smoke and mirror tactics, we will likely find the high poll numbers of Deez Nuts to be, at the very least, less hilarious.
