Chunk 5: Hail to the Yeezy?

Trivia time: did you know that the president of the United States has their personal anthem? It’s called “Hail to the Chief”, and it’s meant to be played on formal occasions whenever he/she enters a room. I bring this up because can you imagine what that tune would sound like if Kanye West ever became president?

Kanye has had an, er … interesting couple of weeks. But as someone who has previously battled their own mental health demons, you won’t find me passing judgement on his self confessed bipolar condition.

Instead, this being a US political blog, let’s dive into Mr West’s recent announcement that he intends to run for president on November 3rd. Can he? And if he did, what are the chances he could win, or, more likely, affect the overall outcome?

Well, as you’re probably beginning to notice with all things American and presidential, it’s a little tricky, so let’s break it all down (that’s as rap as I can get) …

First, Kanye West has declared his preference is to run as a Republican, and have Donald Trump drop out. So far, there is little indication of that happening (and even then, Republicans would have to nominate him).

That means he would have to run as an independent. And unfortunately for him, no independent has ever won the presidency. George Wallace won 13.5% of the national vote and five states in 1968. Ross Perot won 18.9% of the vote and no states in 1992. Both nowhere near good enough.

To register as an independent, Kanye would need to file with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). That happens automatically once you can prove you’ve spent $5,000 on your campaign, which presumably he did during his recent event in South Carolina (the one he’s been apologising to his wife for ever since on Twitter).

But has he left his run too late? Because Kanye has already missed the filing deadline to appear on the ballot in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. That’s a lot of electoral college votes to just give away.

Kanye’s best chance might be to run as a write-in candidate. A write-in what?

It’s literally what it sounds like: when handed a ballot with Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s name on it, a person instead writes in the name Kanye West. Or Yeezy (although I’m not sure that would actually count). But even doing that is complicated: 9 states (Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Hawaii) don’t allow write-ins, and 34 of the remaining 41 states have specific T&Cs just for doing so.

But even if Kanye managed to overcome all of that, he’d still need to convince people to vote for him. And while he certainly has a penchant for creating publicity, we’re not talking about albums or sneakers here. Without time to raise much money, he’d need to spend a lot of his own. As a recent example, when Michael Bloomberg ran to be the Democratic presidential nominee earlier this year, he burned through $900 million cash in just 100 days. For that, he secured just 59 Democratic delegates, whereas Joe Biden ended up with 2,627.

So, yeah, sorry Kim, but President West is looking less and less likely with each passing moment. But I’m sure there are still more than a few nervous Democratic pollsters praying he decides to do nothing. Because any votes he did manage to put together would almost certainly come from Joe Biden.

Let’s not forget that in the 2000 election, a third party candidate named Ralph Nader, received 97,421 votes in Florida, the majority of which would otherwise have gone to Al Gore. And Gore went on to lose that state, and thus the presidency, by just 537 votes.