Here’s the bad news: Kanye West said he was running for President in 2020. But the good news is: it seems like that ship has already sailed.
According to reports from Intelligencer, multiple campaign professionals claim that Kanye actually began the process of having his name included on the ballots for Florida and a few other states as a third-party candidate.
A source told the outlet they had been contacted by Ye’s team about going to Florida in order to get the necessary signatures so that he could make it on the state’s ballot by the deadline, which is on July 15. That would mean 132,781 Florida voters would have to sign the petition in less than a week.
The outlet spoke with Steve Kramer—who manages a firm that assists candidates in making the ballot—who said that Kanye’s team hired him to get West on the ballots in both Florida and South Carolina.
He went on to say that his team was “working over [the] weekend there, formalizing the FEC and other things that they’ve got to do when you have a lot of corporate lawyers involved.” Kramer also said the team, which is made of paid and volunteer workers, was continuing to gather signatures.
“We had overwhelming support to get him on the ballot,” Kramer claims. “Whether anybody is going to vote for him or not is up to them.”
Weirdly enough, later that same day, Kramer told Intelligencer, “He’s out.” When the outlet asked what happened, Kramer replied, “I’ll let you know what I know once I get all our stuff canceled. We had over 180 people out there today.”
So…there you have it. It looks like just as quickly as Kanye decided to run for President, he decided to pull out. Imagine that.