It looks like Knox County, Tennessee, has found its new mayor—and he’s been known to conjure lightning from the depths of Hell from time to time. CNN reports that one-time WWE champion Kane, born Glenn Jacobs, won the mayoral election in a landslide victory Thursday night, pulling in twice as many votes as his Democratic opponent Linda Haney.
“This professional wrestler—and I normally don’t use wrestling analogies for the campaign—but this professional wrestler got into a no-holds-barred, last-man-standing match, and when the bell rung, he was victorious,” Jacobs said in his victory speech Thursday. “We were victorious.”
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The election comes just two months after the nearly seven-foot-tall Jacobs secured the Republican nomination in a significantly tighter primary race, where he beat Knox County Commissioner Brad Anders by only a few votes.
The man who the WWE once called “a monstrous abomination” started his professional wrestling career back in the 1990s and maintained one of the longest—and bloodiest—runs in WWE history, while also manning a Tennessee insurance and real estate company with his wife on the side, ESPN reports. He started “winding down” his wrestling career during his campaign, according to Bleacher Report, though that didn’t stop Kane from donning the mask and dishing out a chokeslam on Smackdown last June. Now, after raising hell in the ring, the new mayor is hoping to lower taxes.
“When I announced that I was going to run for mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, unfortunately, among the political establishment, it was met with pretty resounding laughter,” Jacobs said Thursday. “That a professional wrestler could think that he could be mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. And if anything, what that did was make me want it even more.”
Jacobs’s friends from the WWE have come out in force to celebrate him taking home the mayoral belt, with the WWE praising his “strong political victory” that “began over a year ago.”
“The Devil’s Favorite Demon” has officially been elected to public office, everybody. It’s just a matter of time before we have to watch Anderson Cooper awkwardly moderate the 2024 presidential debate between Kane and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. At least we won’t have to suffer through Lincoln Chafee again.
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