It seems Kanye West’s epic Video Music Awards speech lit a fire. He closed his 13-minute acceptance speech for the Video Vanguard Award with the quip: “And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.” So of course a college student created the Ready for Kanye Political Action Committee (PAC).
Kanye PAC chair Eugene Craig III, a 24-year-old student at the historically black university Bowie State, already heads up another PAC he created this year, called the Young Minority Republicans Fund. “We think [West] is a champion of a lot of issues and he has an interesting perspective. [The PAC] is not just a joke,” Craig told Reuters. Indeed, he filed the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission and set up a Facebook page. He has purchased the domain ReadyForKanye.net but there is not yet a live site there.
Craig, who says he is a “very, very adamant Rand Paul supporter” in the 2016 presidential election, further explained his motivation in an interview with RollingStone.com:
First, it’s an opportunity to reach voters who ordinarily would not be in tune to the process, who are apathetic to the process. The second part of this is that a party that can openly accept Donald Trump has room for Kanye West. Donald Trump is shrinking the party—I’m a member of the Republican Party—and Kanye West brought us an opportunity to actually grow it. Thirdly, we have a gentleman in Mr. West who 1) stands for small business and entrepreneurship, has spoke out against corporatism; 2) is a school choicer, and has spoken about the racial disparities in regards to public school systems; and 3) has openly spoken out against the war on drugs and the pipeline that the war on drugs provides to the private prison systems. I think if you were to put those issues on a piece of paper and say, “What kind of candidate is that?” that sounds like a Republican candidate to me. And barring—and this is very important, I hope you quote this—barring a sitting Republican president—because that’s the only way I will support this, is if there’s no sitting Republican president—if Kanye is going to run in 2020, I would love to see him run in a Republican primary. He brings a lot to the discussion that’s missing.
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This started out as an operation to engage voters who probably would not have been reached otherwise, but over the course of the day, I think… I’ll say this. In the age where Donald Trump is the leading contender for Republican nomination, anything is possible.
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We’re not necessarily looking to raise money for Kanye, but I do think that if there’s no sitting Republican president and he decides to run, it would be nice to have some data mined and voters reached.