Are These Teenagers Really Running a Presidential Campaign? Yes. (Maybe.)

[brooklynite]

Zach Montellaro, a Politico reporter, reads the Federal Election Commission website like a tabloid. He not only trawls the big, dry database in which presidential candidates register to run; he also reads several smaller aftermarket ones that reformat the filings from the first. On Twitter, he follows F.E.C. bots that tweet out campaign filings as they post. On the night of March 19, he was up late when one such tweet, from @CATargetBot, crossed his feed: “NEW FEC F1 #POTUS Mike Gravel for President Exploratory Committee.”

At first, Montellaro wasn’t sure if the filing was real. He remembered Gravel from the 2008 Democratic primary. The former Alaska senator, once well known for helping disseminate the Pentagon Papers, was 77 then. His run, when it’s remembered at all, is recounted as a kind of Dada diversion that began with a silent art-house film of the candidate throwing a rock into a lake and peaked in the primary debates, with Gravel pointing fingers, castigating war hawks, roasting Joe Biden, embarrassing himself and asking future President Obama, “Barack, who do you want to nuke?”

As these escapades returned to mind, Montellaro surmised that a second Gravel run didn’t seem totally out of the question. He tweeted a comment on the senator’s age, but soon some other Twitter users observed that the contact address on the F.E.C. form belonged to a teenage boy in New York. Recalling a prank from 2016, involving a fake filing for the candidate “Deez Nuts,” Montellaro deleted his first tweet and published a correction: “It appears we’re all being trolled by a couple of high school kids.”

A few minutes later, @MikeGravel tweeted back: “Zach, you aren’t being ‘trolled.’?”