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Why Kanye West and other third-party candidates always had bad luck in presidential elections?

Xiaodong Fang
3 min readNov 20, 2020

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Kanye West ran for President in 2020 as the nominee of “Birthday Party.” | Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Kanye West, presidential nominee of “Birthday Party,” collected 60,000 votes out of an estimated total of 160 million. In his four months campaign, the Grammy Award-winning rapper has failed to complete some “necessary” tasks of winning - such as collecting thousands of signatures to have his name on the ballot (his name appeared on 12 states), building a 15% on average polls to appear on presidential debates, and raising large amounts of money to support his campaign…

Libertarian Jo Jorgensen claimed to receive more than 1.5 million votes, less than 1% of total votes in 2020. The figure is far less than 3.28% of the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee Gary Johnson in 2016. Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins also earned much less vote share (<0.1%) this election than 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who won 1% of the popular vote that year.

Throughout history, only four third-party candidates have ever won electoral votes (EV).

Why do thrid-parties and independents always have bad luck with their presidential bids? The answers could be categorized into three…

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Xiaodong Fang
Xiaodong Fang

Written by Xiaodong Fang

Political Scientist studied and worked at #Georgetown #IowaState #JamesMadison | Observing #Elections and #China

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