Glenn Jacobs, better known as WWE wrestler Kane, has been elected mayor of Tennessee’s Knox County.
The 7ft-tall Republican won a landslide victory against his Democratic opponent, Linda Haney, claiming 51,804 votes to her 26,224.
Jacobs’ victory yesterday follows a far more closely run contest to win the Republican nomination. The 51-year-old wrestling star beat Knox County Commissioner Brad Anders by just 23 votes in a vote in May, CNN reports.
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Jacobs, who has wound down his WWE career, insists he doesn’t normally use wrestling analogies in his political life, but told supporters at his victory party: “This professional wrestler got into a no-holds-barred, last-man-standing match, and when the bell rung, he was victorious. We were victorious.”
The three-time WWE world champion first found fame as Kane in 1997. Billed as the demonic half-brother of WWE superstar The Undertaker, he is also known as the Big Red Monster, for sporting a red mask to conceal “hideous burns from a fire supposedly started by Undertaker years before”, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel.
His political ideology is less dramatic. Jacobs “favours limited government and opposes tax increases”, says the newspaper.
“The idea that the government can protect us is patently absurd,” he wrote in a 2014 blog post about the US National Security Agency (NCA). “All the government can do is to destroy our liberties while promoting the illusion of safety.”
Jacobs, who owns an insurance agency in Knoxville, will be sworn in as mayor on 1 September.
He is the second WWE star to win public office in the US. Jesse “The Body” Ventura, who holds a spot in the WWE Hall of Fame, was mayor of a Minnesota town for four years in the early 1990s and was elected to be the state’s governor in 1998.