Kanye, we hardly knew Ye.
Rapper and fashion designer Kanye West is not running for president in 2020, ending his haphazard bid less than two weeks after he announced his candidacy in an Independence Day tweet.
New York magazine reported Tuesday that West is bowing out of the race, citing a political consultant who West hired to help him get on the ballot.
“He’s out,” said Steve Kramer, president of the firm Get Out The Vote.
West’s bid was brushed off and ignored by many in the professional political class, seen as a publicity stunt or a joke.
He never filed the paperwork to run for president with the Federal Election Commission. Filing deadlines to be an independent candidate listed on the ballot in two major Electoral College states, North Carolina and Texas, had already passed by the time he sent his tweet-announcement, and more than a dozen other states had filing deadlines before the end of the month.
An interview with Forbes further cemented the idea that West was not serious. He said he wanted to model his White House after the fictional country of Wakanda from Marvel’s Black Panther, that he would start a new party called the “Birthday Party” (“Because when we win, it’s everybody’s birthday,” West explained), that obscure Wyoming pastor Michelle Tidball would be his running mate, and that he had no policy platform for foreign relations or taxes.
But West’s presidential aspirations were serious enough that he worked with Kramer to start at attempting legitimate organizing efforts.
New York reported that a source had been approached about going to Florida to gather signatures to get West on the ballot by Wednesday’s deadline and was offered $5,000 for a week’s work. The rapper would have needed 132,781 signatures from Florida voters to get on the ballot in less than a week. That is a monumental task for a campaign, as it took Democratic presidential candidates weeks and many volunteers to amass 5,000 valid signatures to appear on Virginia’s primary ballot.
Kramer said on July 9 that West’s team was “working over weekend there, formalizing the FEC and other things that they’ve got to do when you have a lot of corporate lawyers involved,” and that there were paid and volunteer signature-gathering efforts in process to get West on the ballot.
Not long after, Kramer said that West was no longer pursuing the highest office in the country.
“I have nothing good or bad to say about Kanye. Everyone has their personal decision about why they make decisions. Running for president has to be one of the hardest things for someone to actually contemplate at that level,” Kramer said. “Any candidate running for president for the first time goes through these hiccups.”
During his short-lived bid, West received support from billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla and Chance the Rapper, and West renounced his support for President Trump. “I am taking the red hat off,” he said.
TMZ reported on July 9 that West’s family was concerned that he was suffering a bipolar episode and that his presidential run and some of the more outlandish things he said to Forbes was part of the episode.
