As of this writing, it’s Super Tuesday. All across the country people will be trying to make the tough decisions on which candidate they believe should receive their political party’s nomination. Voters are asking themselves the hard questions. Who will be the best face for America’s foreign policy? Who has the ability to keep our economy growing? Who is most qualified to face the harsh realities of race relations in the United States and start the healing process?

These are all important questions that I encourage eligible voters to ask themselves before getting out to vote. Unfortunately, this post is not designed to help you answer those important questions. It’s designed to open you up to a lighter side of the presidential race most people haven’t seen—domain name speculation and spoof sites.

Domain Name Speculation and Parody Sites

Domain name speculation is simply identifying and registering domains (URLs) with the intent of selling them later for a profit. One of the most commonly used examples of this is the domain wallstreet.com, which was purchased for $70 and sold for just over $1 million at auction in 1999. For the presidential campaigns, it’s not profit that motivates domain name speculation. Candidates face a constant barrage of websites that appear to be official—but are built to combat candidates, educate or just have a laugh.

The prime example: www.tedcruz.com.

The entire message of the website is boiled down into one hero image with “Support President Obama. Immigration reform now!” You can be fairly confident the Ted Cruz campaign has nothing to do with this site.

These digital pranks aren’t isolated to just one political party: www.hillaryclinton2016.com upon first glance is a carbon copy of the Huffington Post. However, the content is decidedly not pro-Clinton.

There isn’t a whole lot a candidate can do in these situations—they aren’t likely to sell a domain to the candidate that they’re rallying against. A brand in a similar position could likely purchase these domains as part of their digital strategy. Mapping out several domains to buy before naming and starting a company or candidacy can be a way for brands to avoid this kind of mess online. But, there are endless possibilities of URLs and you can’t buy them all.

Getting Creative With Presidential Domains

Unless you’ve been avoiding social media recently, you’ve likely seen John Oliver, host of the HBO show Last Week Tonight, set up a site at the domain www.donaldjdrumpf.com. An obvious derivative of donaldjdrumpf.com, it pleads the case to Make Donald Drumpf again and even allows for the download of a Chrome extension that replaces the word “Drumpf” with “Drumpf” which provides way more joy than one would expect. 

There’s no way the Donald Drumpf campaign could have anticipated a movement to #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain. This kind of website activism is an inevitable part of the process that can’t be solved with a few purchases of domains. You can type in just about any spin of the candidates’ names with the words, “for president”, “for America”, “vote”, and “2016” to receive some really fun results. Most of the sites are jokes and I encourage you to find all you can.

Here are a few of our other favorites that you have to see:

• Jebbushforpresident.com which is a site owned by two enigmatic and fun looking gentlemen by the names of CJ and Charlie who describe themselves as “Engineers, Doggy Dads, and Madly in Love”

• reasonstovotetrump.com This one was kicked around social media a few weeks back and has led to a few other similar domains picking up the calling. Rubio seems to be the only winner here, and I’m not sure if its good or bad for the Cruz campaign that nobody wanted to buy his domain. Poor Ted.
  • reasonstovotebernie.com
  • reasonstovotehillary.com
  • reasonstovoterubio.com
  • reasonstovotecruz.com

    

• bernieforpresident.com. Bernie has a good set of fun punches thrown his way, with my personal favorite being a site dedicated to helping you make the choice between Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator, or Bernie Lomax, the titular character in the 1989 movie “Weekend at Bernie’s”.

• Or electbernie.com which is actually very informative about driver safety in the state of New York. On the site they pose the question “ Why is (our) site called ElectBernie.com? That’s a great question and one day we will have an answer.”

• Probably some of the most complex spoof sites are dedicated to Ted Cruz. tedcruztruefacts.com was a joke site set up by the Daily Show with Trevor Noah and has a listing of “true facts” such as “If you hold Ted Cruz up to your ear, you hear the ocean” and “Ted Cruz’s greatest fear is giraffes, but just the animal cracker kind”.

• donaldtrumpforamerica.com forwards you to a saucy picture playing on Ted Cruz’s Canadian roots and hillaryclintonforamerica.com redirects to (what was) Carly Fiorina’s campaign website.

• My personal favorite  is tedcruzforamerica.com. A mirror of the Canadian Government’s website dedicated to informing people on how they can go through the Immigration process.

As promised, this post won’t help you decide on who to caucus for, or even convince you to vote. However, if you ever plan to run for president—or have a successful brand—do yourself a favor and consider buying up some of the related domains before your name becomes just another Internet meme.