By Erikka J ~9min read
In April 2024, at a bookstore and gallery in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Che “Rhymefest” Smith announced he was running for the city’s school board. He opened by rapping “Glory,” the song he wrote with Common and John Legend that won an Academy Award. Then he cut the music and told the room that the song had been written by two products of Chicago Public Schools.
That was the campaign launch. Not a speech with a performance attached. A performance that was the argument.
Seven months later, he won. Smith took his seat in January 2025 as an elected member of the Chicago Board of Education representing the South Side, and he’s on the ballot again this November. Thirteen years earlier, he had run for alderman of the 20th Ward and lost. His win was a small, local example of a bigger story playing out in hip-hop politics right now – the people who built careers on the mic are turning up on ballots.
The microphone was always political
This may look like a novel headline that runs the social media cycle and disappears. “Rapper runs for office”…meh. But the through-line here is older than hip-hop…it runs directly through all kinds of Black music.
“Strange Fruit” (a personal favorite that influences my singing style) was written as a poem by a New York schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol, published under the pen name Lewis Allan. It was Billie Holiday’s voice that made it unbearable to sit through…and that turned a piece of writing into a political indictment.
Nina Simone spent a career refusing to separate the recital from the argument, most plainly on “Mississippi Goddam,” a song that cost her airplay and bookings, and that she performed anyway.
Is hip-hop protest music?
I’d offer that it always has been. By the late eighties, Public Enemy had built an entire sonic architecture around confrontation, and N.W.A. was reporting from Compton in a way that got them a warning letter from the FBI. More protests from the West Coast came in the form of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” becoming a signature rallying chant of the Black Lives Matter movement, and YG’s release featuring the late Nipsey Hussle that served as an irreverent response to the 2016 presidential election.
More East Coast contributions include 2021’s Judas and the Black Messiah soundtrack where hip-hop veteran Jay-Z rapped “I arrived on the day Fred Hampton got mur- … hol’ up, assassinated just to clarify it further.”
That line runs straight to the present. Cameron McCloud of the Dallas collective Cure for Paranoia wrote and posted a new rap every single day in 2025, and Rep. Jasmine Crockett announced her U.S. Senate run through one of them in a social media reel that went viral.
None of those artists held office. They didn’t need to. The point is that Black music has functioned as civic testimony for a century, and the microphone has always been understood…by the people holding it and the people trying to take it away…as an instrument of political consequence.
I came up making music in that time; I first found hip-hop in it’s “golden era” (the 1990s) as a pre-teen. I’m a singer, but wrote most of my own songs with hip-hop-influenced beats, a hip-hop cadence, and a little rapping here and there. My mentor Kleph Dollaz of the hip-hop duo Il Biskits even joked that I “wrote like a rapper” when we first met. I was featured on other artists’ records where my role was to sit inside someone else’s rhythm and enhance it. (More on that here.)
With that background, I’ve deeply understood that these voices were always political. What’s new, is that some of them are now listed on ballots.
Have any rappers won a race for office?
In June 2022, Dupré “DoItAll” Kelly of the hip-hop group Lords of the Underground won a runoff for Newark’s West Ward council seat, becoming what’s widely reported as the first platinum-selling hip-hop artist elected to office in the United States. It wasn’t his first attempt; he’d run and lost before. This past May, the West Ward re-elected him with nearly 60% of the vote over three challengers. I couldn’t summarize what this means any better than he did – “I am what hip-hop looks like grown up.”
Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell was on a congressional primary ballot this past August in Florida’s 20th District, a race scrambled by mid-decade redistricting that pulled a sitting congresswoman from a neighboring district into the field and split it five ways. He lost.
If the pattern above means anything, that reads more as a chapter rather than as an ending. The Miami bass pioneer carried a First Amendment fight to the U.S. Supreme Court and spent decades coaching youth football in Miami. This was his second run at office, fifteen years after finishing fourth for Miami-Dade mayor. Rhymefest lost his first race too.
“Hol’ up wait a minute…yall thought I was finished?!” in the words of Philly rap legend Meek Mill.
There are more to add to the list. Antonio Delgado rapped as “AD the Voice” before representing New York’s 19th District in Congress and serving as the state’s lieutenant governor. Battle rapper Bruce Franks Jr. won a seat in the Missouri House in 2016. Moses “Shyne” Barrow went from a Bad Boy Records deal to Belize’s House of Representatives and its Leader of the Opposition. María Isa Pérez-Vega released a hip-hop album the same day she was sworn into the Minnesota House.
Motown’s Martha Reeves served four years on Detroit’s City Council. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s voice is on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. And a 2016 South African radio interview resurfaced this summer, reminding everyone that the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, once recorded raps as “Young Cardamom”.
What this means for how campaigns sound
Political ad spending for the 2026 midterm cycle is projected to reach $11.6 billion, according to AdImpact, making it the most expensive election cycle in US history…including presidential years.
According to the ad platform Basis, audio’s share of that has been small – about 1% in the 2022 midterms and 3% in 2024 – even though the average voter spends more than a fifth of their media time with audio, from terrestrial radio to streaming to podcasts. AdImpact projects radio alone to be around $273 million, roughly 2.4% of the total. That gap is the most underpriced real estate in political media, and it’s the one channel where the messenger’s voice is the entire delivery mechanism. This raises the stakes for getting it right when it comes to audio quality, modernized messaging, and strategic production – to include choosing the right voice.
Casting cultural fluency
The ability to effectively interact with the demographic you want your message to reach significantly matters when a campaign is trying to reach a specific community. This is especially important when it comes to young voters, who usually make up the lowest turn out group but will also make up the largest voting bloc come 2028.
Campaigns are already leveraging big names in hip-hop to reach young black voters in particular. A read either sits in the pocket or it doesn’t. The singular way to learn that rhythm is by spending years inside a style of music where the timing is part of the message, yielding authentic cultural fluency.
When I get a script and find a cadence within it, I feel where the beat wants to land within the copy – down to the fraction of a second that each pause needs to hold between phrases. When a spot is built to reach voters who grew up on this music, a technically clean read delivered from outside the culture registers as exactly that. Listeners clock it immediately, and once they hear it, they tune out.
This came into play for many spots I’ve voiced, including ads run during the primary for Donavan McKinney and Abdul El-Sayed, who both won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary in August. El-Sayed won despite being outspent on the air by more than eight to one…the most expensive Democratic Senate primary ever run. He faces a general election in November.
The Raw, Real Deal Takeaway
Rhymefest is on the ballot again November 3. Kelly just won re-election in the ward he grew up in. Uncle Luke took another swing and came up short, which is how the first act goes for most of these stories.
In every one of these cases, the voice came first and the office came second. Nobody mentioned above learned to command a room in a council chamber. They learned it on a microphone, then they took it to a platform.
The culture these candidates came out of has spent a hundred years learning the difference between being heard and being felt. Holiday’s audience felt it. The kids who wore out Lords of the Underground tapes in 1993 felt it, and some of them are West Ward voters now.
That’s the room your spot walks into. They know when a perspective in an ad was built for them – when it was built to talk to them versus when it talks at them. They know the difference and decide quickly whether to buy in or tune out.
So when you’re casting a voice for campaign, Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV), or issue content this fall, cast for the room.
If you want a voice that already lives there, my political voice over and Black voice over pages have the portfolios and demos to showcase just that, and my inbox is open for your project.
Votes get counted in one booth, attention is won in another.
Hip-hop has held America’s attention for over five decades. Moving that influence from pop culture to public policy is exactly the kind of power move that the culture has been telling stories about since the first sixteen bars.
Now, it’s off to the races.
FAQ
Have any rappers been elected to public office in the United States?
Yes. Dupré “DoItAll” Kelly of Lords of the Underground won a Newark City Council seat in 2022 and was re-elected in 2026. Che “Rhymefest” Smith was elected to the Chicago Board of Education in 2024. Bruce Franks Jr., a battle rapper, served in the Missouri House from 2016 to 2019. Antonio Delgado, who recorded as AD the Voice, was elected to Congress in 2018 and later served as New York’s lieutenant governor. María Isa Pérez-Vega was elected to the Minnesota House in 2022. Zohran Mamdani was elected to the New York Assembly in 2020, then as NYC mayor in 2025.
Who was the first platinum-selling rapper elected to office?
Dupré “DoItAll” Kelly of Lords of the Underground is widely reported as the first platinum-selling hip-hop artist elected to public office in the United States. He won Newark’s West Ward council seat in a June 2022 runoff and was re-elected in May 2026 with nearly 60 percent of the vote.
Did Uncle Luke win his 2026 congressional race?
No. Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell lost the August 18, 2026 Democratic primary in Florida’s 20th Congressional District, a five-candidate field reshaped by mid-decade redistricting. It was his second run for office; he finished fourth in the 2011 Miami-Dade mayoral race.
Is Rhymefest still on the Chicago school board?
Yes. Che “Rhymefest” Smith was elected in November 2024 in Chicago’s first-ever school board election, took office in January 2025, and is running for re-election on November 3, 2026, in Sub-District 10a on the South Side lakefront.
How much is being spent on political advertising in 2026?
Political ad spending for the 2026 cycle is projected at roughly $11.6 billion. Audio has historically received a small share of that – about 1% in the 2022 midterms and 3% in 2024 – even though the average voter spends more than a fifth of their media time with audio, from terrestrial radio to streaming to podcasts. AdImpact projects radio to be about 2.4% of that total ad spend at around $273 million.
Why does the voice actor matter in a political radio or audio ad?
In audio, the voice is the entire delivery mechanism. When a spot is built to reach a specific community, listeners can tell within seconds whether the read comes from inside that culture or outside it, and a read that registers as an outsider loses attention fast. Rhythm, cadence, and cultural fluency are learned skills, and they’re the difference between a message that gets heard and one that gets felt. More on political voice over here.
Erikka J is an Emmy-winning Black female voice actor, singer, event emcee, and communications consultant from Washington, D.C., who grew her career in Virginia and is now based in Atlanta. To check availability or request a custom demo, click the Start Your Project button.
