Kid Rock claims he is running for United States Senate. While I am skeptical—
OK, go ahead and get those jokes out. I’ll wait.
Are you good now? Those name jokes are not as funny or original as you think.
—anyway, while I am skeptical that we see a Senator Rock, or even a nominee Rock, in the near future, it’s also not entirely crazy to think that a run for office by Robert James Richtie could be, uh, “So Hott.”
There are many questions to be answered about Rock’s trial balloon. He has been rumored, semi-jokingly, as a candidate for the Senate race in 2018 in his home state of Michigan. He’s now launched a website, and on Wednesday tweeted this:
I have had a ton of emails and texts asking me if this website is real… https://t.co/RRVgISDFeq The answer is an absolute YES. pic.twitter.com/uYCUg6mjW1
— Kid Rock (@KidRock) July 12, 2017
The website is missing some essential details—for example, what state he intends to run in, and for what party. A link to a store leads, as Evan McMorris-Santoro noted, to a domain run by Warner Brothers, his record label.
But let’s assume that Rock would run in his native Michigan, and that he would run as a Republican. Start with the fundamentals of the race. The seat is held by Democrat Debbie Stabenow, who’s seeking her fourth term in the Senate. Stabenow’s polling isn’t terrible—47 percent of Michiganders approve of her performance, against 38 percent who don’t, according to Morning Consult. That still places her in the bottom third of senators for popularity, although she easily won her last two races. Meanwhile, Donald Trump won the state in the 2016 presidential election, the first Republican to win there since 1988.