text: A long time ago, Mary Anne Huntsman and Kris Humphries (Kim Kardashian's soon-to-be-ex and former Utah Jazz player) saw Elf together and he ate a big tub of popcorn. There was no second date, this is not really newsworthy, and yet it somehow blows our minds. Did the fates know they were destined to be lower-tier, supporting-actor celebrities in roughly the same news cycle? ||||| In early November, the Jon2012girls were in New York City getting their hair and makeup done for a karaoke-themed photo shoot at a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side. Mary Anne, Abby, and Liddy Huntsman are the twentysomething daughters of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr., which means that the sisters—who've become celebrities over the past few months for tweeting snarky updates from the campaign trail at @Jon2012girls—are sort of unofficially running for first daughters. Which makes this technically a campaign stop, even though there are no voters here and we're in a banquet room that smells like old rice. 
   
   As a stylist feathered Mary Anne's hair with a curling iron, Liddy cued up "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips on her iPhone. Lately they've been playing this song to get psyched up before watching their dad debate. Despite all the free media attention his daughters have garnered on his behalf, as of this writing Huntsman remains a margin-of-error candidate. So decide for yourself if their rallying cry of Hold on for one more day is touching or painfully ironic. Still—when they break into perfect three-part harmony, they totally crush it. 
   
   
   
   Would-be first daughters (from left): 
   
   Liddy, Mary Anne, and Abby Huntsman. 
   
   The Huntsman daughters' three-headed social-media presence is a mischievous, seemingly unfiltered corrective to the stage-managed sneering of the campaign. A few months ago, the Herman Cain campaign posted a bizarre ad in which Mark Block, Cain's mustachioed chief of staff, enumerates his boss's virtues in tough-guy close-up. At the end, he takes a defiant, Denis Leary–ish puff on a cigarette. Even in the context of a Republican race already shaping up as the Battle of Who Can Come Off Like a Bigger Assclown Before Losing the Nomination to Mitt Romney, this was weird. Liddy, the youngest Jon2012girl, whose dream is to work for a show like Saturday Night Live someday, couldn't believe it. 
   
   "I was stunned that this was a legit commercial," she says. Plus, she was home from college and bored. So she and her sisters shot a Funny or Die–style parody of the ad that doubled as a Huntsman spot. They wore fake mustaches; instead of smoking, they blew bubbles. It went viral, and for at least the length of a news cycle, they were more famous than Jon Huntsman himself. Even Mark Block was impressed. When Mary Anne ran into him before a debate in South Carolina, she told him how much she loved his ad. "I loved your ad," he responded. 
   
   Today the touch-screen menus on the karaoke machine are user-unfriendly, and most of the songs are in Chinese. A determined Liddy pokes at one until it coughs up Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl"—the girls sing shhhh when Gwen says shit—and gradually, despite the presence of a photographer, sisterly goofiness ensues. This is definitely not the first time they've sung LeAnn Rimes's "Can't Fight the Moonlight." 
   
   Afterward they talk (shrewdly yet idealistically) about using new technology to reach young voters disillusioned by Obama's failure to deliver all that hope and change he promised the Facebook generation, and how off-the-cuff sass is the only way to speak to an audience that gets its news from Jon Stewart and Twitter. They explain, politely, that no, they're not angling for gigs on Fox ("I'm not blonde," Abby points out sagely), nor are they trying to be the Kardashians of politics. Abby, who used to be in PR and works hardest to keep her sisters on-message, explains that their parents raised them to give back. Every night, she says, "they'd ask us what we'd done that day to make someone's life a little better, to make someone smile or whatever. I know that sounds cheesy—but that's the philosophy we were raised with." Campaigning for Dad is their way of doing that. 
   
   Before the girls arrived, Huntsman's campaign spokesman called to warn me that Liddy has yet to fully grasp what "on the record" means, although he needn't have bothered. When I mention the Kardashians, it's Liddy who volunteers the information that Mary Anne once went on a date with Kim's now estranged husband, Kris Humphries, when he was on the Utah Jazz. 
   
   "Liddy!" Mary Anne says, mortified. 
   
   But it's true. They saw Elf; Humphries bought a bucket of popcorn the size of a garbage can. Mary Anne never heard another thing about him until he turned up on E!, dating a reality-TV queen. 
   
   "You're gonna get me in trouble," Anne says. 
   
   Liddy takes a sip of water. "I'm just trying to make someone smile."
target: – Today in Completely Random Celebrity Couplings: Kim Kardashian ex Kris Humphries once went on a date with Jon Huntsman’s daughter, Mary Anne. Her sister, Liddy, reveals that little tidbit in a new GQ profile, to a horrified reaction ("Liddy!" says Mary Anne). Humphries was playing for the Utah Jazz at the time; the two saw Elf, ate popcorn, and never saw one another again. Writes Noreen Malone in New York, “This is not really newsworthy, and yet it somehow blows our minds.”