No, Kanye West isn’t really running for President

| 4:00 pm EDT July 5, 2020
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2020 took another bizarre turn yesterday when Kanye West announced in a tweet that he’s running for President in 2020. This set off a tidal wave of consternation, confusion, and fear that Kanye’s presence in the race might tip the scales in Donald Trump’s favor. Here’s the thing, though: Kanye isn’t running.

How do we know this? For starters, it’s too late for him. Based on general election filing deadlines, Kanye can’t even get his name on the ballot in North Carolina, New York, New Mexico, Maine, Indiana, or Texas. And with a bunch of other states having filing deadlines just days from now, there’s no reason to expect that Kanye could pull things together from scratch quickly enough to get on the ballot in those states either.

So no, this isn’t a real campaign. If Kanye were actually looking to run for President, he’d have launched his campaign much sooner. For that matter, he hasn’t actually launched a campaign. He simply posted a tweet claiming he’s going to run. Whatever you think of Kanye as a musician, an activist, or a person, the reality is that he’s someone who frequently displays bizarre, unstable, and even delusional behavior. We’re supposed to take his word on it that he’s going to launch an actual presidential campaign, just because he posted a tweet? Even Donald Trump, the self professed king of Twitter, kicked off his campaign at an event complete with an escalator ride. He got in the race in time for the primary process. Even though Trump was a joke of a candidate, he went about running in a real way. We’re seeing none of this from Kanye at all.

Of course this brings us to the real reason Kanye announced he’s running for President: he’s in the process of releasing a new album. This is a perfect way for him to bring publicity to his new album, at a time when traditional promotional methods like touring aren’t available. Keep in mind that his wife Kim Kardashian has previously warned Kanye not to make the mistake of running for office, because the media would end up tearing him apart for it.

So we can expect Kanye West to push this “I’m running for President” stunt just far enough to boost exposure for his new album, but not far enough for him to start facing the kind of scrutiny that an actual candidate would face. This stunt is a good reason to worry about everything that’s wrong with society in general, but it’s not a reason to worry about the outcome of the 2020 election. The fatalists tell us that we have to treat every potential doomsday scenario like it’s real – but paranoia isn’t the same thing as vigilance. We have real things to worry about in the 2020 election. Kanye doesn’t appear to be one of them.