Whether or not American rock musician Kid Rock, real name Robert James Ritchie, is actually running for a Senate seat in Michigan’s 2018 midterms isn’t important. For despite all the teasing and self-promotion, voters should take note of Rock’s public masquerades and treat them seriously. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has argued, “maybe this is all a joke, but we all thought Donald Trump was joking when he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower and announced his campaign.” Said “joke” gained further legitimacy on Friday when the leader of a major GOP Super PAC backed Rock’s potential bid.
“We’d be actually very interested in his candidacy,” Senate Leadership Fund President and CEO Steven Law said on C-SPAN. Citing a RealClearPolitics poll pitting Rock’s potential bid against incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), he noted that the closeness of the results wasn’t something to ignore. “The superficial sense of Kid Rock is that he’s an entertainer, and that he’s kind of this wild redneck. But the truth of the matter is that he’s done a lot in his home state philanthropically, he’s a pretty smart guy, he thinks about policy and he’s a shrewd businessman.”
Of course, whether or not Rock is actually running for Stabenow’s Senate seat still isn’t clear. Though he revealed the existence of a website purportedly declaring his candidacy, the musician has yet to concisely say whether or not he will actually run for office. Nor has Law or anyone affiliated with the Super PAC met with Rock to discuss the possibility, though the former isn’t willing to “count him out” and remains “pretty interested in his candidacy,” according to C-SPAN. “So if you’re watching, Kid,” he concluded on Friday, “we hope you run.”