UPDATE, 7/15/20, 5:31pm ET: False alarm? Despite one of his campaign advisors saying that he dropped out of the presidential race, it appears that Kanye is back in. An organization called Kanye 2020 filled out the first form required by the FEC to run for president on July 15. The Statement of Organization declares that Kanye 2020 will serve as his “Principal Campaign Committee.” It also states that Kanye will be running as a third party candidate for the BDY Party… the Birthday Party.
ORIGINAL: Call him The Electoral College Dropout. Kanye West has ended his 2020 bid for the presidency just 11 days after his shocking July 4 announcement, according to one of his advisors, Steve Kramer. “He’s out,” Kramer simply told The Intelligencer. “Running for president has to be one of the hardest things for someone to actually contemplate at that level.” Kanye’s apparent decision to end his campaign comes shortly after election expert Neil Sroka told HollywoodLife that he has much of a chance of winning the 2020 race as an “extraterrestrial.”
We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future. I am running for president of the United States 🇺🇸! #2020VISION
— ye (@kanyewest) July 5, 2020
Kanye announced that he would be joining the 2020 presidential race by tweeting, “We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future. I am running for president of the United States #2020VISION.” He, however, did not file any paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to make his candidacy official. Kanye was facing significant roadblocks to his campaign. At the time of his announcement, the deadline to appear on the November 3 ballot had already passed in five states. By the beginning of August, it would be 30 states.
Kramer claimed that Kanye had a team working in Florida and South Carolina to get him on the ballot. In Florida, Kanye would have needed to gather signatures from 132,781 voters by July 15 — a nearly impossible task. Without ballot access, he would need to launch a write-in campaign, another difficult process.As Neil noted in our EXCLUSIVE interview, no candidate has ever won the presidency on a write-in campaign. There are even nine states where write-ins aren’t allowed.
Despite not filing with the FEC, Kanye doubled down about his bid for the presidency in “four rambling hours of interviews” with Forbes. “If I win in 2020, then it was God’s appointment,” he told the magazine. He laid out some of his platforms in the July 8 piece: “I am pro-life because I’m following the word of the bible. Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work,” he said. He went on to say that when doctors recommend vaccinations, it’s because “they want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”
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