Kanye’s 2020 run to nowhere
My first reaction to Kanye West’s quixotic run for the presidency brought back memories of Jill Stein’s similar run for the same office in 2016 as the candidate of the Green Party. Stein did not have a snowball’s chance in you know where to win. Her stated goal was not to win, but to bring attention to the Green Party agenda, but the real goal was to provide disgruntled Bernie Sanders voters a place to go when he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton in order to elect President Trump. Stein selected a black running mate with an Afro-Centric name Ajamu Baraka as her vice-presidential running mate.
This time around we have a well-known successful Black rapper with a history of bipolar disorders, running as an independent with a white woman Christian fundamentalist as his running mate, Michelle Tidball.
In 2016, Jill Stein was able to win 51,000 in Michigan. Donald Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes. In Wisconsin, Jill Stein won 31,000 while Donald Trump’s margin of victory was 22,000. Now we don’t know where those votes would have gone if Stein had not been in the race, but it is not just speculation that her role in the race had the same effect in 2016 that Ralph Nader had in 2000 when Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida and George W. Bush won the Supreme Courtcontested Florida election by a mere
537 votes.
So, third party candidates who have no chance of winning can have a disproportionate impact on the election results in tight races. It certainly looks like 2020 could be a tight race.
What also makes Kanye’s run so suspicious, is like Stein, who had Russian connections — she visited Russia in December 2015 and sat at the same dinner table with Russian president Vladimir Putin and future, but shortterm national security adviser Michael Flynn — Kanye has strong connections to Trump. We will have to wait to see if Vlad starts sporting Ye T-shirt.
Kanye West’s entry into the race also raises interesting suspicions because Trump lawyers were the same lawyers used by Kanye West to try to get on the 2020 presidential ballot in Wisconsin. Smells fishy to me.
I was having a conversation about this recently with my friend, Professor Gerald Jaynes of the Yale economics department. His take on this was very interesting and convincing. Unlike Jill Stein, Kanye West’s run for the Oval Office is likely to attract some Black conservative voters who are fans of Kanye’s Christian rap, but maybe not so much his earlier collaborations with Jay Z. The intersection of black conservative Christian rap fans has got to be an infinitesimally small portion of the electorate. And if anything, this group of marginal Black voters is likely to lean more heavily towards being in Donald Trump’s camp and not the Joe Biden camp.
Therefore, supporters of Biden should not think history is repeating itself. If anything, Trump’s clandestine support of Kanye is good for Biden. These are voters who would never vote for Biden anyway. So, their vote for Kanye is one less vote for Trump.
Somehow, I do not think Trump has figured this out. I think he is so unidimensional in his thinking, that he thinks Kanye equals Black and therefore, he will steal Black votes from Biden. Trump probably thinks Kanye can be his 2020 Jill Stein.
Remember that incredibly strange meeting Trump had with Kanye in the Oval Office. I suspect that this is when Trump came up with this strategy. According to Michael Cohen, Trump has said to anyone who will listen that Blacks and Hispanics are too stupid to vote for him. He must think the best thing to do under these circumstances is to give these voters someone they can support who will help him get reelected.
I have news for President Trump; Black voters are not stupid. We know that Kanye has no chance of winning. We know that this a fraudulent attempt to split the Black vote. We know that Kanye is even less qualified for the presidency than you, the most unqualified President in history, and look at what this has wrought. Black voters know all too well from our history that when it is convenient for whites in power, they will use other Blacks to suppress the legitimate goals of the Black community. There is a term for these tools — Uncle Toms. President Trump, this won’t work. In fact, it will have the opposite effect.
All I can say is, run Kanye run.
If anything, Trump’s clandestine support of Kanye is good for Biden. These are voters who would never vote for Biden anyway. So, their vote for Kanye is one less vote for Trump.