What Happened to Mark Amodei’s Website and Twitter Account?

(Dullard Mush) – Granted, GOP U.S. Senate hopeful Mark Amodei’s online campaign hasn’t been the smoothest since he announced his intent to try and take on Nevada’s Harry Reid. He failed to register his own name as a domain and then saw his Wikipedia profile edited numerous times in a less than flattering way (one said he was dead!). But he finally got his site, AmodeiForNevada.com, up and running and actually started to Twitter. Things were looking up, at least in an online media way.

But something unusual has happened. I went to AmodeiForNevada.com today and received an error message — Firefox couldn’t find the server. Figuring it was probably a temporary problem, I didn’t really think much of it. But when I returned a couple hours later, I received the same message. I then thought maybe his Twitter account might have something on the outage. But it too had disappeared, and with the choice handle of “MarkAmodei” no less.

Now thinking his campaign had also died, I checked his Facebook page. Apparently Amodei’s campaign is still amongst the living, but his site has inexplicably been changed to Amodei4Nevada.com. Even stranger, his new Twitter account has the awkward name of AmodeiNevada (what, he doesn’t like the “4” here?).

So what exactly happened? Did some market research firm tell Amodei using the numeral “4” was considered hipper than the actual word and that going by his own real name on Twitter was too old school and out of touch? It makes no sense. If you did want to use the “4” as the official site, why not just forward the old (and already published on Google) address? And as for the Twitter name change, that’s just crazy.

In fact, about the only other scenario that could explain these changes for the worse would be if the Amodei campaign didn’t actually own the original site and Twitter account. But that would entail one believing that somehow a fan of Amodei launched a campaign site, acquired the MarkAmodei Twitter handle and proceeded to run both unhindered for a month or so after Amodei announced a U.S. Senate run. That couldn’t have happened, right?

But whatever happened, it doesn’t say much for a campaign that wants the chance to topple the U.S. Senate Majority Leader.

(The Dullard Mush blog can be found at http://dullardmush.blogspot.com)