President Kanye West, is it possible?
And why is he running against President Trump?
Someone he’s been a big supporter of in the past.
“I love this guy right here.”
To get to the bottom of this you need to have a bit of an understanding of America’s Electoral
College system and why 3rd party candidates pretty much always fail.
Let’s take a look at that first question.
Does Kanye have a realistic chance of winning?
So far, it’s not looking good.
For one thing, he’s already missed the deadline to register to actually appear on the ballot
in a number of states.
But let’s just even if he was registered in all of the states, it wouldn’t really
matter because he’s not a Democrat or a Republican.
These are the two big political parties in the United States and if you don’t belong
to either of them you don’t really have much of a chance.
Since this guy was elected in 1860, it’s been pretty much a two horse race.
Since Lincoln these 3 have been the only ones outside of the two major political parties to score
a decent amount of votes and none of them got close to winning.
So, why is it so hard for someone who’s not a Democrat or Republican to become President?
Well, it has a bit to do with the US Electoral College.
This is the system that the US uses to decide it’s major elections.
Basically, it doesn’t matter who gets the most votes overall it matters who gets the
most electoral votes which you can get by winning a state.
Just take a look at 2016, Hillary Clinton & the Democrats got about 3 million more votes
than Donald Trump overall.
But Donald Trump won more states and more electoral votes, so he became the President.
One of the biggest criticisms of the Electoral College is that it’s winner takes all in
pretty much every state.
For example, if a Democrat wins 50.1% of the vote in California and a Republican wins 49.9%,
55 of those electoral votes go to the Democrat and 0 of those votes go to the Republican.
Remember those 3 guys I mentioned earlier?
The most recent got a big fat zero electoral college votes even though 19 million people
voted for him.
All because he didn’t win a single state.
And this is what makes it a lot harder for people like Kanye.
You might be thinking, isn’t Kanye just like Trump in 2015?
He’s a celebrity with next to no experience in politics.
The difference is, Trump was elected as the nominee for the Republican party.
“We will make America great again.”
Whereas Kanye is just running by himself.
That means Kanye has to compete with 2 massive political organisations.
Both with tens of millions of members across the country.
And both having raised more than a billion dollars at the 2016 election.
This is a nightmare for smaller political parties to compete with, let alone one a single
bloke that’s not even a politician.
So, let’s say 2020 is a bit of a write-off.
But what about 2024?
It’s probably going to be the same answer, unless Kanye becomes the Democratic or Republican
nominee.
Which, to be fair, not many people thought would happen to Trump in 2015.
So, 2020: No.
2024: Who Knows?
But also, probably no.
And this leads us to the big question.
Why is Kanye bothering to run in 2020?
And why is he running against Donald Trump?
Someone he has been a pretty vocal supporter of in the past?
“We've been friends for a long time.”
There are a couple of different theories.
Number one: Kanye truly believes he can win.
If there’s one thing we know about Kanye, he’s got a lot of confidence.
“I am a God.”
And hey, if he thinks he can win, good for him.
Theory number two:
He’s using this run to send a message.
Candidates outside of the big two parties use this platform to talk about things that
they believe in and issues that they think the main two parties aren’t addressing or
taking seriously.
“Our philosophy is: Keep the government out of my bedroom and out of my pocket.”
So even if they don’t win, it sends a message to the two big parties that ‘hey, these
ideas are popular and maybe you should think about adopting some of them.’
So, what idea or platform is Kanye trying to push.
At the moment it’s not clear.
He hasn’t put forward any solid policy ideas.
Some more suspicious people say his platform may just be selling more albums, because he
has an upcoming album on the way.
And he has a bit of a habit of trying to get attention and stir up headlines before he
drops music.
But hey, maybe it is actually about politics.
And now, to the final theory:
Kanye West is actually trying to take votes away from the major candidates.
The thinking behind this is that people that would have voted for Joe Biden or Donald Trump,
would be voting for Kanye instead.
And in the past, there have been examples of third party candidates having a massive
impact on the election, even if they’re not actually getting many votes themselves.
One of the biggest examples of this came in the 2000 election between
George Bush & Al Gore.
Al Gore lost in Florida by just 537 votes.
Ralph Nader, from the Greens party, scored about 97,000 votes.
And polling data and a study in 2006
show it’s likely the majority of those Nader
voters would have gone to Al Gore instead of George Bush.
Meaning a Democrat win in Florida
and a Democrat win overall.
So, would a Kanye run hurt Joe Biden or Donald Trump more?
There is a lot of talk about Kanye doing this to hurt Joe Biden, because he’s been a big
supporter of Trump in the past.
The thinking behind this is the majority of Kanye’s fans are Democrats or Independent,
which is backed up by a recent study.
So if a lot of Kanye's fans were to vote with him, Joe Biden would be losing more potential
votes than Donald Trump would.
The counterargument to that is that because Kanye is a Donald Trump supporter, it’s
more likely that Donald Trump supporters would want to vote for him.
Now, it’s important to say that this is a pretty cynical view that Kanye is only
running to hurt another candidate.
And it’s also pretty much impossible to prove.
But one thing that we do know is that if Kanye does go through with this, and decide to properly
run, we’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the media.
And hopefully he uses that platform to talk more about what he believes in and not to
try to sell more albums.