Maryland College Student Launches ‘Ready For Kanye’ Political Action Committee

By Kenrya Rankin Sep 01, 2015

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.