Kanye West draws 2 percent support in presidential bid: poll

Rapper Kanye West garnered 2 percent support in a Politico-Morning Consult national poll released Wednesday as he struggles to qualify for the ballot in a number of states for his last-minute presidential bid. 

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, remains 9 points ahead of President Trump in the poll, 49 percent to 40 percent. West received support from 2 percent of respondents, which is 7 points behind the 9 percent of respondents that said they have “no opinion.”

The rapper is a former supporter of Trump’s who famously visited the White House in 2018.

He has drawn criticism for his lone campaign rally of the cycle after he claimed that Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves, she just had them work for other white people.”

Wednesday’s poll also threw cold water over the notion that Black voters are swayed by West’s campaign, as some strategists suggested could be the case when he launched his bid on Independence Day. 

Broken down by demographic, West received 2 percent of the Black vote and 4 percent of the Hispanic vote. The demographic group he did best in was those in Generation Z, where he received 6 percent support. 

West has successfully filed paperwork to appear on the ballot in a handful of states, including Wisconsin and Ohio, where he is reportedly receiving help from Republican operatives. West said in an interview last week that he is “not denying” that his campaign seeks to hurt Biden’s White House bid.

The Politico-Morning Consult poll collected responses from 1,983 likely voters from Aug. 9 to 10 and reported a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

The poll was conducted prior to Biden naming Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate, which could potentially influence voter attitudes.