West wants to play spoiler in the 2020 presidential election.
Kanye West is running for president of the United States. Is he for real? West has sent a few stray tweets suggesting a write-in campaign, and held one event. He’s not being included in many polls, and it would be a surprise if he made it onto the debate stage with President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the fall. Yet he’s getting on the ballot in a few states, where he could play conceivably spoiler if the general election is close. The necessary administrative grunt work to being a viable independent candidate for president — namely, filing the forms to get one’s name placed on the November ballot — is largely getting outsourced to Republican political operatives. All of this comes across, to the political world, as a wayward effort to potentially help Trump, the incumbent with whom West has forged a strange kind of alliance over the past few years. I CAN BEAT BIDEN OFF OF WRITE INS #2020VISION As with much of West’s career, it is difficult to discern where the sincerity ends and the showmanship begins. West always zigged when others would zag. In his music, more often than not, he has been lauded for it. “My sense is [West] is driven more by his ego and the publicity,” Hasan Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University, told me. “But he acknowledges and recognizes whatever votes he gets, he will be pulling from Joe Biden’s black base. He is cognizant and aware of that. I just think he doesn’t care.” West is not under any obligation to be loyal to the Democratic Party. Black Americans tend to vote at extremely high rates — often above 90 percent — for Democrats, but they are not monolithic. Many set aside socially conservative beliefs and support Democrats because of other issues. West is a capitalist who believes that material success demonstrates his merits, much like Trump (who himself was a Democrat until about a decade ago). West’s presidential run may end up being little more than trivia. Unless the election is decided by the thinnest of margins, experts say he’s unlikely to win enough support to swing the results. Black Americans aren’t going to simply support a Black candidate because there’s one on the ballot. The 2020 polling we do have with West already makes that clear. Nevertheless, the 2016 election was decided by 100,000 or so votes in three states. The stakes are too high for West to be dismissed as a joke. In one way, his campaign is already a serious success: Kanye West is once again forcing America, through sheer force of personality, to contend with him and his ideas. West has said for years, at least as early as 2015, that he would make a run for the presidency in 2020. But it was never clear how serious he was — not unlike Trump, who had flirted over the years with seeking political office, without ever being taken too seriously, before deciding to do it in 2016 and then actually winning the White House. And in the past few years, West has drawn closer to Trump, often to the bewilderment of the political press and his musical peers. He went to see the president-elect in Trump Tower before the inauguration. He’s donned a MAGA hat. He visited the Oval Office to ostensibly talk about criminal justice reform. Every time it was a media sensation, but it never seemed to be more than Kanye being Kanye. Then in July, he announced he was running for president for real — and started trying to get his name on states’ ballots. He has already missed filing deadlines in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Michigan, among others. That is at least one reason to doubt his chances of winning 270 Electoral College votes on his own. ”I initially thought, ‘here we go again, another publicity stunt for West,’” Lakeyta Bonnette-Baile, a Georgia State University professor and author of Pulse of the People: Political Rap Music and Black Politics, said in an email. “I still think it is partially a publicity stunt. I do not think Kanye believes he can win.” But he can still play spoiler in the important swing states. In the first week of August, West filed his paperwork to be on the ballot in Ohio and Wisconsin. The latter was decided by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, part of Trump’s inside straight in the Midwest that allowed him to triumph in the Electoral College despite losing the national popular vote. Turnout among Black voters in Wisconsin was lower with Hillary Clinton on the ballot in 2016 than it had been with Barack Obama. West knows this could throw a wrench in the election. Or, as he put it when asked by Forbes about damaging Biden’s electoral chances: “I’m not denying it.” (West also met with Trump son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner recently, although Kushner says it was a general policy discussion.) Right now, the FiveThirtyEight 2020 presidential forecast thinks Wisconsin will be among the decisive states for the election’s winner. West being on the ballot could really matter. That is probably why Republicans affiliated with Trump’s campaign are helping him with his paperwork. Per GOP source, Wisconsin Republicans are hoping @kanyewest will receive as many votes as Libertarian Gary Johnson did in 2016 — about 107,000. Lane Ruhland, a lawyer who has worked for the Trump campaign, dropped off the signatures for West to get on the Wisconsin ballot, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. Republican operatives and activists have been involved in some official capacity with getting West on the ballot in at least five states, according to the Washington Post. One of them, Gregg Keller, interviewed to be Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. In Montana, according to the Billings Gazette, one of the people collecting signatures to get West on the ballot could be heard calling out: “You want to help Trump? We’re trying to take votes away from creepy Uncle Joe.” But those efforts haven’t gone entirely smoothly, which could complicate the Trump ploy and the viability of West’s campaign. Democrats have challenged West’s eligibility to appear on the Wisconsin ballot. According to the Journal-Sentinel, a local news reporter observed Ruhland entering the elections office seconds after the 5 pm deadline for signatures to be submitted.
