There are clear parallels between what's happening now and what happened during Kanye's 2020 presidential campaign, reports bencjacobs
who saw an opportunity to use him as a spoiler candidate to help Donald Trump win reelection — drawing a robust paycheck at the same time. Emails between the consultants and advisers to his campaign show the efforts to get him to run a more active presidential campaign and his evident lack of interest in running.
One October 2020 email from Dan Centinello, a Republican operative involved in the campaign, includes a plan for West to potentially visit cities in several swing states where he was not on the ballot, such as Pennsylvania and.
There were also plans for scripted tweets around presidential debates, press statements, and an Election Night event. None of these ever materialized, and West was invisible on the campaign trail aside from a bizarre event that July that he held in South Carolina as part of athere. It’s when he infamously broke down in tears, declared that Harriet Tubman “did not free the slaves,” and talked about his opposition to abortion.
In another email, Jill Holtzman Vogel, a top Republican election attorney doing work for the West campaign, muses about potential legal action to force election officials in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire to recognize the use of stamps on ballots so that voters didn’t have to write the rapper’s name out in order to ease a write-in campaign. “If we want to be serious about impacting New Hampshire as well, then one this team should consider is suing NH pre-election re:stamps,” she wrote.