Watch 5 minutes of Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News and you would assume his devotion to former President Donald Trump extended to actually casting a vote for Trump’s re-election. However, several outlets including POLITICO are reporting that Carlson told multiple people that he did not vote for Trump in 2020 and instead cast his ballot for friend and entertainer Kanye West.
The Kanye West campaign was seen by most as a joke, a publicity stunt or an attempt to help Donald Trump’s re-election odds by siphoning off black votes in select states. West would sometimes tell people that he was forming a new party called the “Birthday Party” (and he used the label in Louisiana) but he was generally identified as “Independent” or “Unaffiliated” in most of the dozen states where he appeared on the ballot.
Carlson did promote West’s campaign on his TV show several times last year, even airing this television ad produced by the campaign for free during prime time…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIHgkfVPE9M
In the end the entertainer reportedly spent more than $10 million of his own money to promote his presidential ambitions, but badly fumbled ballot access drives and captured only 71,079 votes. That put him behind not only the less well-funded Libertarian and Green nominees but also tickets from the Alliance Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
So… did Tucker Carlson actually vote for Kanye West? No. At least, not a vote that was counted.
Carlson has homes in several states but officially resides in Florida, where he is registered to vote in Lee County. Records show that he did vote in the 2020 presidential election, unlike in 2016 when he was registered in the District of Columbia but didn’t make it to a polling place.
The problem with Tucker’s story is that Kanye West didn’t appear on the Florida ballot in 2020 and failed to register as an official write-in with the state. So if the TV personality did write-in his favorite rapper last November, that vote was not recorded for West.
I agree, most of his actual votes came at Trump’s expense. I think the rationale for his campaign was that he would draw culturally conservative black voters… but the whole scheme was just too transparent.
Kanye West’s highest percentage of the vote was in Houston County, Tennessee, which is in northwest Tennessee and is predominantly white. People who think Kanye West drew away Biden supporters are probably wrong. I suspect most people who voted for Kanye West were people who would have voted for Donald Trump if Kanye West had not run.
Thanks, Austin. Carlson is such a disappointment. Laying aside agreement or disagreement with his politics, he used to be something of a truth-teller, calling out GW Bush for his mockery of Karla Fay Tucker and talking about how the “man of the people” pose of many conservatives is exactly that – a pose from just another elite. He used to do an excellent chat on the WaPo site with Ana Marie Cox. I don’t necessarily agree with either of them, but it was an interesting exchange between two people who respected each other. Now he’s all about this kind of crap.