Former US President and Republican nominee Donald Trump has resoundingly beaten his Democrat rival Kamala Harris in an online poll conducted by billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter).
Harris accepted her party’s official nomination earlier in August after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the race; she later tapped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate.
On Tuesday, Musk posted “Since a lot of people have asked, here goes a super unscientific poll.”
According to the results as of Wednesday, of the 5.8 million votes, almost three quarters of respondents indicated they would vote for Trump in November, while just over a quarter want to see Harris elected.
Last week Musk interviewed Trump on his X Spaces platform, where they engaged in “unscripted” dialogue with “no limits,” according to Musk; the interview has garnered more than 275 million views to date.
Trump later told Reuters that he would consider Musk for a role in his administration. “If he would do it, I certainly would. He’s a brilliant guy,” he said.
Musk, replying later on X, wrote that he is “willing to serve.”
During the interview Trump called Harris “third rate,” “incompetent” and a “left lunatic.” The Harris campaign issued a fiery response, denouncing Trump’s “extremism and dangerous agenda,” and decrying “self-obsessed rich guys who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.” According to Musk, the stream was subjected to a large-scale DDoS (dedicated denial of service) attack, leading to technical problems.
According to polling averages posted by The New York Times, as of Wednesday, Harris leads Trump by two percent in two swing states: Wisconsin and Michigan. Meanwhile, Trump leads by four percent in Georgia. Both candidates are about even in Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to the newspaper’s poll collation data.
