Rapper Kanye West reportedly conceded defeat in the 2020 presidential race Wednesday after returns showed he failed to gain more than 0.5% of the vote in any state.
West made an apparent one-word concession on Twitter early in the day, where he wrote “WELP” alongside a photo of himself in front of the Electoral College map, according to Entertainment Weekly.
West later deleted the tweet but posted the same image again, but this time wrote “KANYE 2024,” hinting at a future bid for the White House.
All told, West registered about 60,000 votes nationwide, The Associated Press reported.
His strongest support came in Tennessee — where more than 10,000 ballots cast went to West, the majority from the metro Nashville area, according to reports.
By Wednesday afternoon, there was still no clear winner among the two major party candidates — the incumbent GOP President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
»OCTOBER: Kanye West makes last-ditch pitch to voters as write-in candidate
The national vote tally was continuing in key battleground states that are still too close to call.
Before this year, West had been an avid supporter of President Trump.
The artist filed his paperwork July 15 with the Federal Election Commission as an independent candidate.
Four days later, he officially announced his bid for the White House in South Carolina, where he delivered a bizarre campaign speech in which he proposed a $1 million payout to mothers, decried abolitionist Harriet Tubman and broke into tears after revealing he once asked his wife Kim Kardashian to consider aborting their first child.
During the next few weeks, reports surfaced that Republican operatives were helping West qualify for ballots in key states, raising suspicions he was being goaded to run by Trump allies who saw West as a popular persona who could steal support from Biden.
In August, West accused Democrats of planting a private investigator to shadow his campaign workers as they fanned out to petition public support in Wisconsin.
With sluggish national polling, West managed to appear on the ballot in 12 states, including Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia and Vermont.
He was disqualified, however, in many others due to filing late paperwork and voters who claimed they were tricked into signing petitions in support of his long-shot campaign.
West ran on what he called the “Birthday Party” ticket and found a running mate in Michelle Tidball, a self-proclaimed “biblical life coach” from Cody, Wyoming, where West purchased a 4,500-acre ranch in September 2019.
In California, however, West’s name appeared on the ballot as a vice presidential candidate of the American Independent party, whose nominee for president was Rocky De La Fuente.
West was also officially on the ballot as a write-in candidate in five states, including Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
That left 33 states in which West’s name did not appear on the ballot at all.
Three weeks before Election Day, West surprised by releasing his first campaign ad which called on voters to choose him as a write-in candidate.
Then on Election Day, West announced in a tweet that he was proudly voting in a presidential election for the first time.
Last week on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, West pondered the outcome of the election.
“There couldn’t be a better time to put a visionary in the captain’s chair. I believe that my calling is to be the leader of the free world. It was something that God put on my heart back in 2015.”
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