One of the first national polls to be taken since Kanye West announced his US presidential bid has been released, putting the rapper at around two per cent of the vote.

Redfield & Wilton Strategies conducted the poll with 2,000 registered voters in the US last week (July 9) to gauge the country’s voting intentions. The poll puts West joint-third with the Libertarian Party’s Jo Jorgensen, also at two per cent. Joe Biden currently leads with 48 per cent, while Donald Trump is polling at 39 per cent.

Obviously, the poll isn’t that representative of America’s actual voting intentions. Two per cent of 2,000 means that just 40 people said they’d vote for West, and being a national poll, it doesn’t accurately reflect the state-by-state voting that would actually determine the outcome of the election.

If the numbers did look like this on polling day, then there could still be the potential to siphon off enough votes from Joe Biden to swing some states where the vote is tight. As West told Forbes recently, he has no issues with taking votes from Biden even if it benefits Trump.

West announced his candidacy on Twitter earlier this month. Speaking to Forbes, he revealed some controversial beliefs, including his anti-abortion, anti-vaccine stance, and that he’d like to see prayer in classrooms, ending the separation of church and state in schools.

Whether we should take this presidential bid seriously is another matter. For starters, West hasn’t yet filed the relevant paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to actually run, and has missed the deadline to be able to be on the ballot in many states.

Then there’s the fact that the rapper tends to go quiet for long periods of time before making headline-grabbing declarations around the time he has a new album to promote (he recently released “Wash Us in the Blood”, the first single from his 10th album God’s Country).

More concerningly, TMZ recently reported that people close to West are worried that he is in the midst of a serious bipolar episode.

Still, Kanye West is one of the most famous people on the planet, and he says he’s running for president, which is kind of hard to ignore. Plus, we all know what happened last time a presidential candidate wasn’t taken seriously.

While West might be polling fairly low among the American public, and has lost his first high profile supporter, Elon Musk, he does have one celebrity endorsement – Chance the Rapper yesterday suggested on Twitter he’d rather support Kanye West than Joe Biden.