Well, turns out that the bot didn't delete itself. I just double checked and all that it did was change its username (to @deplorable1850). Since it'll probably change it again (or block me, or actually delete itself) once I send this, I'll grab some screenshots to document it. https://twitter.com/JohnCarolin/status/1302068015538806784

To start with, the header of the page. Nothing too interesting here, but definitely note the 10/2016 account creation date. It's weird to me that an account that old has the activity that it has.

By the way, a quick heads up that this thread will be kinda long

Next, the "tweets" pane. Yup, it's just that one tweet!

This nearly 4 year old account has only one tweet, retweeting @Rasmussen_poll attempting to make some sort of point about journalistic integrity in a (misguided) attempt to "gotcha" @NateSilver538 and other media figures.

How about the "tweets and replies" pane? There's a lot more material here! Still, the oldest interaction is with me on that argument about Rasmussen's (very strange) question wording and how some media figures handled it.

I made that post on 8/30, but this account didn't respond until 12:54 PM today (9/4/2020). The tweet that they retweeted from Rasmussen was posted only a few minutes earlier (12:42 PM 9/4/2020).

From what I can tell, all of their posts up to now took place in two bursts: one from 12:54 PM to 1:07 PM today, and another from 10:15 PM to 10:14 PM.

All of the tweets from the first burst are in defense of Rasmussen, including that retweet. They're also responding to pretty old tweets. Two were responding to tweets posted over a month ago. My tweet that the bot responded to was 5 days old.

The second burst of tweets includes the "lmao you think I'm a bot" tweet that prompted them to change their username and then a few tweets in a thread arguing about election interference and corruption and all of that fun stuff. Not a peep about Rasmussen.

Next up, the "likes" pane! Again, this isn't a lot of stuff for a nearly 4 year old account to have liked. Its also all very recent. Apart from one post (from 8/6/2020, so not even *that* old), every liked tweet was posted in the last 2 days.

I didn't actually collect any numbers, but it seems like about half of the likes are related in some way to Rasmussen or polling. Many are from the @Rasmussen_Poll account itself, while a few are from related conversations/arguments.

The rest of the likes are a bit more all over the place, but they're all advocating a right-wing position in a pretty inflammatory way. A number of them are related to IDW (or IDW-wannabe, or IDW-adjacent. I'm not totally sure) internet personalities Steven Crowder and Tim Pool.

How about his followers and the people that he follows?
Here are his followers:
A couple of accounts that tweet out sneaker news (likely automated/bots)
a comedian (who has tweeted support for BLM)
an apparently random person's account (might be fake, not sure)
a private account.

And who he is following: Let's start with the boring ones
A number of athletes, sports personalities, and sports organizations
Some sportswear brands (explains the sneaker bot followers)
Some IDW (or IDW-adjacent) personalities
Trump-related accounts
Kim and Kanye

Then there are the interesting ones:
Some cross country/track/running lifestyle accounts
Some accounts that appear to be related to Northwest Cabarrus County High School (their Track/XC program in particular). This includes the account's only mutual, that private account.

It also includes another account that looks *very* similar to that private account. The screen names share a last name and bios show the individuals attending the same college in the same class and running on the same XC/track teams.
Twins, I guess?

What does all of this mean?
I'm not quite sure. When I say that I think that the account is a "bot", I'm not saying that I think that all (or even many) of the account's actions are automated. What I am saying is that the account is trying to look real and achieve specific goals

A real person is probably doing most of the operation of the account, but they might be running dozens of other accounts just like it, trying to push the same (or similar, at least) storylines.

Maybe one of those twins is behind it. Maybe the Kremlin is. Hell, I could be completely off the mark and it could be a (very strangely behaving) real person running their normal account.

What I do know, though, is that the main goal of this account (from what I can see, at least) is to push Rasmussen's story. I'm not quite sure why this is so important, this story is apparently meaningful enough to spend resources (apparently) astroturfing it.

I hope that @Rasmussen_Poll hasn't encouraged this apparent astroturfing, either actively or passively. Given their recent hyper-partisan social media activity, though, I wouldn't be shocked if they were aware of it and didn't care.

apropos of nothing, @mediainvestors (which is either the twitter account of the PE firm that owns Rasmussen or the twitter account of one of it's partners. It isn't quite clear) has a fair amount of pro-Trump content on it's timeline.
I hope that this doesn't influence Rasmussen.

(I'd also like to note that @ScottWRasmussen, who founded @Rasmussen_Poll back in 2003, left that company back in 2013, over "disagreements with investors over business strategies". His own election polling, over at http://ScottRasmussen.com , largely contradicts @Rasmussen_Poll's)