Kanye West’s declaration of a presidential run is seen as little more than a joke in professional political circles, but continued hype around the artist could be serious business for President Trump and Joe Biden in the November election.
If there are tight margins in key swing states, a significant amount of people writing in West’s name who would have otherwise voted for Trump and Biden has the potential to swing and complicate the election.
“People underestimate how powerful celebrity is in this country,” Rachel Bitecofer, an election forecaster at the Niskanen Center, told the Washington Examiner.
With 118 days until the election, a serious West bid looks improbable. He has no campaign infrastructure and has not filed any official paperwork to declare his candidacy. And he has missed deadlines to appear on the ballot as an independent candidate in several states, including North Carolina and Texas. West also is unlikely to meet petition requirements to appear as an independent candidate in more than a dozen states with deadlines before the end of the month.
(Kanye told Forbes in an interview published Wednesday that he thinks he could still get on some ballots. “I’m speaking with experts, I’m going to speak with Jared Kushner, the White House, with Biden,” he said, with no explanation why either Trump or Biden would want to help a competitor get on the ballot.)
But millions of voters cast ballots for candidates with no chance of winning the election, and this year, one of those people could be West.
“If he’s out there making a big scene all through the fall, I definitely think there will be some amount of write-in joke Kanye — not all of them will be joking, sadly — but protest Kanye votes,” Bitecofer said.
A handful of states do not allow write-in candidates at all, but all the major swing states this year do. And those are states where, in 2016, the margin of write-in votes and third-party votes was close to, or exceeded the margin of victory for Trump over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In Michigan, in 2016, where Trump won by 10,704 votes, the state tallied 8,955 write-in votes, 8,177 of which were for conservative anti-Trump candidate Evan McMullin (and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who some think helped spoil the election for Clinton, received 172,136 votes in Michigan).
That doesn’t reflect the full extent of write-in votes. In many states, votes for candidates who do not officially file paperwork with the state are not counted, while some report nonregistered, write-in candidates as a lump sum rather than counting each individual vote.
In Wisconsin, where Trump beat Clinton by 22,748 votes, 35,150 voters wrote in a candidate, including 22,764 who wrote down names of people who didn’t file paperwork with the state, and 11,855 votes for McMullen.
It is probable that the celebrity effect of West, with apparent backing from Elon Musk, could earn him far more write-in votes than McMullin.
New age self-help author Marianne Williamson, Bitecofer said, is an example of a no-shot candidate aided by the fact that she was previously a public figure who made the campaign harder for “serious” competitors. She made it on a Democratic presidential primary debate stage and polled higher than established politicians such as Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
Whether West write-ins have any consequence, though, will depend on whether the election is indeed razor-close in swing states this year and whether he does indeed continue his presidential run and continue to get talked about.
“It certainly would not be enough to do to matter unless we’re talking about very close margins, down to like half a percent,” Bitecofer said.
Right now, Biden has leads of 6.5% in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and 6.5% in Michigan, according to polling averages compiled by RealClearPolitics.
And if the race is close and there is a “Kanye effect,” the question is whether Trump or Biden will benefit.
“I think it probably strategically benefits the Trump campaign to promote a Kanye write-in campaign,” Bitecofer said, referencing West’s critiques of Biden that the Trump campaign could try to woo black voters and younger voters away from Biden.
“To say that the black vote is Democratic is a form of racism,” West told Forbes.
Others warn that it is not safe to assume that because West is black and a rapper that he will siphon votes from those who might otherwise vote for Biden. One line of thinking is that West’s support for Trump (which he renounced in the Forbes interview) turned off many black voters and Democrats and made many supporters of Trump fans of West.
A 2018 CNN poll that asked about West found that among white people, 24% had a favorable opinion of West, and 50% had an unfavorable opinion, while among nonwhite voters, 20% had a favorable opinion, and 60% had an unfavorable opinion. Of those who lean Democrat, 12% had a favorable view of West, compared to 37% of Republicans.
