Need to conduct a poll before your aspirational run for New York City mayor?
Call Deez Nuts.
Brady Olson made national headlines in August 2015 when he filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission under his nom de guerre, Deez Nuts, to run for president of the United States. He was 15 at the time, and living on his parents’ farm in Wallingford, Iowa. When he asked the legitimate polling company Public Policy Polling in an email to poll Deez Nuts against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the then-high school sophomore got 9 percent of the vote in a poll of North Carolinians.
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A few months later, he was approached by Rocque “Rocky” de la Fuente to conduct some polls of his own for his fledgling runs for public office. De la Fuente ran for president as the Reform Party nominee in 2016 and also for the Florida Senate, where he placed fourth in the Democratic primary.
Now, de la Fuente is floating a run for mayor—and he’s using Olson’s notoriety to get the word out.
Well, Deez Nuts’s notoriety.
“They called me back last January and I’ve been doing a few polls for them since then. This is the first time they’ve sent it out to the public,” said Olson, whose results were sent out by a national PR firm on Wednesday.
Just to be clear, this is not volunteer work, right?
“Well, college is expensive. I’m not gonna go in with zero,” Olson told The Daily Beast. “Compound interest can add up.”
The poll, which Olson conducted on SurveyMonkey using geotargeting, shows de la Fuente “holding our own against [Mayor Bill] De Blasio.”
“I was kind of surprised by the results. When you show them head-to-head, [de la Fuente] holds up. And it’s a huge Democratic city,” said Olson.
Olson is thinking about going to school for sports management to become an athletic director or sports general manager, where he can put all of that analytics knowledge to use. In the meantime, he’s looking forward to his school music department’s trip to New Orleans.
Life has slowed down dramatically since he was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter two Septembers ago, back when his tiny election hack was the craziest story in the 2016 election.
“After a few months, no one cares about what happened. You don’t know how big high-school eight-man football is,” he said.
Olson said Deez Nuts Polling is not really the talk of the town at Graettinger Terril Ruthven Ayrshire Community School in rural Iowa. Not many people at school know he’s doing big-ish money polling for national politicians, or remember that time he polled just 20 points off the lead for president.
