Kanye West’s presidential campaign took another blow Monday when the rapper failed to submit any of the 10,000 petition signatures needed to get on South Carolina’s 2020 presidential ballot by Monday’s deadline, despite hosting his first rally in the state just one day prior. S.C. Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire told The Post and Courier that when the deadline passed, no one from West’s campaign had delivered the petition required. No late registration is allowed.
West will almost certainly not be listed as a third-party candidate on the South Carolina ballot, as the only remaining path would be to receive the presidential nomination of a certified political party in the state, despite declaring he would be running under his own “Birthday Party.” West has only had success getting on Oklahoma’s ballot since announcing he would be running for president on July 4, as the state only requires a $35,000 filing fee to be listed.
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The artist’s presidential campaign kicked off with a Sunday rally in South Carolina that featured many erratic moments from West, including the assertion about Harriet Tubman that the famed abolitionist “never actually freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people.” Tubman’s direct descendant, Tina Wyatt, told TMZ Tuesday that West “doesn’t even understand” who Tubman was, and urged him to educate himself instead of running for president.
“If we were left alone, we would be in an entirely different place,” Wyatt explained, adding of West, “If it hadn’t been for people like her, he would still be on that plantation. He would not be able to be out there saying the things he says, and he wouldn’t have the money he has, because they would have it all.”
West also recalled his own father’s wish that his mother’s pregnancy with him was terminated while discussing abortion during the rally to mixed response. “I almost killed my daughter. I love my daughter. … God wants us to create,” said the fashion designer, who has four children with wife Kim Kardashian. “No more Plan B — Plan A.” West added that while he thinks abortion should be legal, he wanted to provide financial incentives for people considering ending a pregnancy. “The maximum increase would be everybody that has a baby gets a million dollars or something in that range,” he said at the time.
Monday night, West fired off a number of rambling tweets, including accusations that his wife was attempting to have doctors “lock [him] up like on the movie Get Out, in which a white family takes over the bodies of Black people, whose consciousnesses they send to the “Sunken Place.”
