Touch The Sky

Since he has already missed the deadlines to register in several states including Texas and New York, and since several more deadlines impend, Kanye West cannot win this year's Presidential Election. But he is no less credible than Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and one of those is not going to win, either. So, given the opportunity, why not vote for him?

As the Democratic Party lost the Southern whites and the white ethnics, so the Labour Party has lost half of the Red Wall, and is going to lose the other half next time, in both cases because of Keir Starmer and everything that he embodies. And as Keir Starmer and everything that he embodies are also going to lose Labour the Black Wall, so in the present decade the Democrats are going to lose the People of Color.

The Southern whites and the white ethnics turned Republican, and the Red Wall is halfway through turning Blue, although there is the question of who the Blue candidates are going to be in seats that voted twice for Jeremy Corbyn and which have almost no Conservative Party members in them. Opportunities abound. 

But the Black Wall will vote for its own self-organised candidates, whose interventions will dramatically alter the colour of many a constituency map. The same will be true of the People of Color, with the first notable example being the West candidacy for President this year. West will make the ballot in every state in 2024, and if he had the wit to choose a suitably famous Hispanic running mate, then he could easily take enough votes to be decisive.

I hope that I may be forgiven for continuing to use "Hispanic". As a rusty, but once moderately competent, speaker of Spanish, I cannot see how the rest of a sentence could accommodate the word "Latinx", since neither a noun nor an adjective can have no gender.

Although West is a few months older than I am, his appeal, and that of probably a younger such running mate, would be over the heads of the Black and Hispanic Establishments to the younger generation. The man whose appeal to youth broke the baradari system at Bradford West in 2012, arguably the heaviest ever electoral blow to that system, was at the time 57 years old. He topped the poll in every ward, including those which were more than 90 per cent white, of what had been a Conservative target seat a mere two years earlier. It can be done.

Culturally and politically, the Southern whites and the white ethnics have been making the Republican Party and its wider base conform to them for decades. Here along the Red Wall, we are learning to love the sweet, sweet taste of being the key swing voters in the key marginal seats of the governing party. The Black Wall has it within its power to do the same thing. And so have those whose emergence as a cohesive, and potentially decisive, electoral bloc has the capacity to begin with the Presidential campaign of Kanye West in 2020.