Politicians vs. Celebrities Fight For Presidency
Kamala Harris is an American politician and lawyer of the Democratic party. Kanye West is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur. One is a politician, the other a celebrity, yet they are both potential runners for the 2020 presidential election in the states. With the way things are running right now, does someone like Kamala Harris stand a chance against a celebrity like Kanye West? Even though I’ll be talking about Kamala and Kanye, I’m using them as examples for comparing career politicians vs. celebrities running in election races.
To see how much of a chance politicians have against a celebrity, let’s first take a look at their social media accounts. Kamala has 1.27 million followers on Twitter, 770,000 likes on Facebook, and 335,000 followers on Instagram. When it comes to Kanye it’s interesting because he can’t be found on any social media platforms. Despite this, it can still be said that Kanye has a lot more followers than Kamala does. This can be reflected by Kanye’s album sales. His latest album alone, The Life of Pablo, went platinum meaning it sold a million units. Besides album sales, Kanye has millions of views on his YouTube videos, and a very dedicated fan base. So it is clear that when it comes to social media and online presence, Kanye beats Kamala in that field. So how can Kamala enhance her social media presence to stand a chance against a celebrity?
To be honest, I think it will be very hard for Kamala to win against Kanye. Unless you’re into politics, you most likely don’t even know who she is. But how many people can say that they don’t know who Kanye West is? Of course, a presidential election shouldn’t be about popularity, but the people need to know you and be able to connect with you for them to be willing to vote for you. So what Kamala needs to do is to find a way to bring herself out there and attract more followers.
I think that it definitely varies for the different generations. When it comes to the older generation, Kamala would most likely have more of their support than Kanye. Comparing these two together, Kamala would be taken more seriously than Kanye by older people. However, when it comes to millennials, I think that Kanye for the most part would have more supporters, because that is a huge part of his fan base. So this is where Kamala would need to do the most work to have a chance against him.
Someone that Kamala can take some pointers from is the “6Dad,” city of Toronto councillor, Norm Kelly. Norm has 726,000 followers on Twitter. Even though that is less than Kamala’s amount, I think Norm has a bigger impact. Norm is very well known because of his tweets. His tweets are most definitely targeted towards millennials and our culture. He even has his own website, 6dad.ca, where he sells products that say “dad” on it, or language that would be used by a younger generation, such as “too lit to politic.” And even though Norm is 76 years old, so not a millennial, he has attracted the millennial generation and pretty much has become a part of it. A part of the reason why Norm connects with our generation so well is because he familiarizes himself with our culture and majority of his content includes these cultural factors. For example, after the Drake vs. Meek Mill fight, he tweeted “You’re no longer welcome in Toronto, @MeekMill.” This simple tweet gained over 118,000 retweets and 104,000 likes, so it shows how much interaction he gets from the younger generation by merely tweeting about an issue that’s occurring in the millennial world at the time.
Therefore, in order for Kamala to have a chance against a celebrity, she in a way needs to also become a celebrity, like Norm Kelly. She needs to garner more millennial followers or else Kanye will have all their support. She can do that by using social media to attract them, by connecting with what’s going on in the culture, like Norm Kelly does. If she doesn’t use social media to gain the support of millennials then I really don’t think that she’ll have a strong chance of winning against someone who has all that generation’s support. If Norm Kelly was to run in an election against another politician that’s not known by millennials, who would have a better chance at winning? Norm Kelly definitely would. Therefore, Kamala Harris needs to tweak and make changes to her social media presence in order to have a chance against Kanye West.
