Blow out the birthday candles but don’t make a wish. It will only end in disappointment. As many people celebrating birthday milestones this year will tell you, 2020 is a bust. Kanye West should have known that the Birthday Party wasn’t going to end in the epic celebrations that he fantasized about.
Kanye West is a rapper, not a politician. He had high hopes of coming in as a secondary option to Trump…and as a way of proving that Biden didn’t have the black vote in his pocket like he thought he did.
However, there were flaws in Kanye’s approach. He started too late. He didn’t grab a campaign manager to get organized. And, he had a bit of an emotional breakdown on the campaign trail.
It turns out that having Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk on your side is not enough to get you elected as president. At least we know that the country still holds onto a sensible side.
Kanye West might have some mental problems, too. Literally. He’s been diagnosed as being bipolar with extreme manic episodes from time to time. Not exactly what we need in the White House, especially when it pertains to international relations.
But…Kanye promised us that when he wins, it’s everyone’s birthday! It’s a nice thought, but 2020 is the year of the drive-by birthday since parties are forbidden. Kanye should have realized this. 2020 has been a flop and so has his campaign to be president.
Kanye has already missed the deadline to file in 10 states as a third-party candidate. He’s on a few of the state’s ballots, though those were dependent solely on paying to be on there. As for other states, he’s being contested. So, with not being on the ballot, he’s relying on people writing his name in.
Kanye’s platform is dependent on pulling black voters away from VP Joe Biden. Easy enough, right? According to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, Kanye was only able to gather a 2 percent support across registered voters in the U.S. That’s sadly 7 points behind those with “no opinion.”
As for the support he’s getting from African American voters, it’s looking just as bleak. He only received a 2 percent support – and the 9-point lead that Biden has over Trump in the national polls shows that Kanye is not even a factor.
But…why? Why don’t people want to vote for Kanye? Well, most people view it as a joke. As Ron Christie, a Black Republican strategist explains, “Democrats traditionally get 90-plus percent of the black vote. I think a lot of people are going to look at Kanye and just say, ‘I don’t think so.’”
Don’t expect Kanye to get out of the race, though. While most people anticipate him dropping out, Kanye has quite the ego on him. Dropping out would mean accepting defeat – and that’s not something he does with ease.
There are actually Republicans in some of the battleground states working to get him on the ballot. Not because they want to vote for him but because they think it can help to get some votes away from Biden in order to help Trump.
Democratic strategists also believe that framing west as a rapper and a Black Man to get the black vote shows that there’s a misunderstanding of what African American voters actually want. As Derrick Clay, a strategist and chair of the Legislative Black Caucus Foundation says, “The bottom line is that Kanye West is an entertainer. That’s not to say that he can’t participate in electoral politics, but his candidacy is more a distraction.”
Does that mean Kanye is out? No. The Dems are still going to watch him closely, even though they’re now happy to have a POC on their ballot with the announcement of Kamala Harris as president.
The sad truth, though, is that Kanye isn’t going to be the next president. Perhaps he can run again in 2024 and use his ‘Stronger’ lyrics as part of his campaign: “Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger.”
