Kanye West comes up tens of millions of votes short in presidential election

December 1, 2020 — by Howard Shu
Screen Shot 2020-12-01 at 11
Photo by Howard Shu

Unlike a certain former reality TV star, the 43-year-old rapper decided to concede defeat.

With the election finished, the media and general public have been constantly talking about Biden’s victory over Trump and Trump’s refusal to concede. But for some reason, no one mentions Kanye West.

In the election, the popular 43-year-old rapper received a whopping grand total of 0 electoral votes before he conceded early Nov. 4. In fact, he did not even show up on enough state ballots to have a chance of winning the election, and instead relied on voters writing him in.

I had some hope that West would get at least some electoral votes from Nevada when the results were coming in, since I figured he might have won and the media simply didn’t know how to tell us. This was obviously proven wrong, however, when Nevada announced Biden’s victory after giving millions of people anxiety for several days.

Before West’s concession, he received about 0.0375 percent of the estimated 160 million total votes cast. This totaled about 60,000 voters.

This was a substantially worse outing than independent candidate Deez Nuts in the 2016 election. Nuts, who was actually a 15-year-old boy from Iowa, polled at 9 percent in North Carolina.

However, West seems not to be deterred by this electoral setback. With his 2020 presidential campaign over, West set his sights on the 2024 election. 

“KANYE 2024,” he tweeted early Nov. 4 in reaction to the results.

Though West’s attempt at a presidential campaign was lackluster to say the least, that’s what also made it strangely fascinating. He put out one presidential advertisement, created a website, went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and put out several impactful tweets such as “We will cure hunger” and “There are people sleeping in parking lots.”

Personally, I liked his running for president for the sole reason that it inspired many memes. I think we can all agree that jokes about his presidential campaign were gold.

Many people find it laughable that he is going to try to run for president again in 2024, but you never know what might happen. As we have seen in 2020, there are many times when things take an unexpected turn. With this being said, I think if Kanye really works hard and takes his campaigning seriously, he could get more than 0.5 percent of the popular vote in 2024.

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