Dale Earnhardt Jr. puts Austin Dillon over the top in Twitter poll after Donald Trump Jr. endorsement fails

Donald Trump Jr.’s endorsement of Austin Dillon in a meaningless NBC Sports Twitter poll either had no impact or backfired spectacularly.

Tuesday evening, Trump Jr. implored people to vote for Dillon against Matt DiBenedetto in a head-to-head poll of which driver had the best special paint scheme. Dillon’s silver Darlington paint scheme was against DiBenedetto’s Halloween paint scheme at Martinsville.

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Trump Jr. has over 3 million Twitter followers. But, likely because many of them aren’t NASCAR fans, his endorsement didn’t move the poll in Dillon’s direction. With just over an hour left before the poll closed Wednesday morning, DiBenedetto had a two-point lead with less than 10,000 votes cast in the poll that did not provide a prize of any sort to the winner.

DiBenedetto then took the lead in a voting spurt that coincided with a Reddit thread noting that Dillon had volunteered to do a question-and-answer session on Reddit’s NASCAR section. DiBenedetto has long been a favorite of the subreddit and he soon took a lead of 12 points over Dillon.

Dillon’s team, Richard Childress Racing, decided that voter fraud had to be the cause and publicly took to Twitter to accuse DiBenedetto’s team (or someone else) of nefarious tactics.

Seriously.

Kinda desperate. And where’s this Twitter passion during races? If team Twitter accounts are this worked up over pointless polls, then they should really be dishing out the trash talk during races. But they don’t.

Anyway, DiBenedetto appeared set to cruise to the win until the white knight rolled in with less than 30 minutes remaining in the poll’s timeframe. Dale Earnhardt Jr. tweeted to his 2.4 million followers to vote for Dillon’s paint scheme that honored his father.

Since Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Twitter followers are far bigger NASCAR fans than Donald Trump Jr.’s, his endorsement put Dillon over the top in a hurry and the driver of the No. 3 car cruised to a win with nearly two-thirds of the votes.

Was it a “fair fight” given that Dillon had to get the endorsement of the president’s son and the most popular living figure in NASCAR to win the Twitter poll? Probably not. But the desperation at least gave us some incredibly dumb entertainment on a December off week for NASCAR. If drivers and teams showed the same emotion for mid-summer races as they did for December Twitter polls, maybe the series’ fans would be a little more enthusiastic.

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter

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