Celebrity Fatigue. Glam doesn’t vote.
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, February 1, 2025 22:08
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If Democrats must have star power, they should figure out better ways to hitch their stars to campaigns and candidates.
https://prospect.org/culture/2025-01-31-celebrity-fatigue-democrats/
Quote:
Kamala Harris held her last rally of the presidential campaign season on the night before Election Day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tens of thousands of people lined up for the free concert that featured Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Fat Joe, Jazmine Sullivan, and the Roots. The vice president seemed almost tangential to the spectacle: It was pushing midnight before Oprah introduced Harris to make her final case to voters.
Did a truncated campaign season persuade Harris-Walz handlers that glitzy unelecteds from the rarified galaxies of Hollywood and the music industry were the fastest and best way to amplify Harris-Walz messaging? It seemed that Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Megan Thee Stallion, Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Cardi B, Katy Perry, Julia Roberts, Eminem, Robert De Niro, Spike Lee, and Leonardo DiCaprio were everywhere all at once—pumping up crowds at rallies in battleground states or tapping out their versions of joy online.
That star power blinded the Harris-Walz campaign to a powerful miscalculation, one that stalked them all summer and into the fall as they zeroed in on the brightest lights: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny. Together, they seemed to constitute a holy grail of good gets. Securing their endorsements, so the thinking appeared to go, would motivate the most sought-after groups in the Democratic base—women, African Americans, and Latinos—and deliver their votes, and the elusive youth vote most of all, to Harris. One by one, the trio signed on: Swift in September, Beyoncé and Bad Bunny in October—days before the election that Harris lost.
In an era of economic hardship and political acrimony, it’s past time for the Democratic Party to recalibrate its relationships with its own millionaire and billionaire celebrities. Beautiful people and free concerts are nice diversions, but they don’t persuade specific groups of voters to cast a ballot for a presidential candidate. That doesn’t mean those candidates, often fangirls and -boys themselves, will ever swear off celebrity endorsements and the accompanying media attention and dollars they generate. But celebrities have to be deployed in ways that can serve specific goals with tangible outcomes.
“Hope, joy, and hard work missed the mark for the majority of Americans,” says Susan Smocer Platt, Joe Biden’s onetime Senate chief of staff, whose memoir, Love, Politics, and Other Scary Things, looks back on her and her late husband’s Capitol Hill careers. Polls and vote totals make clear that the celebrity endorsements and appearances did not have the results the Harris team anticipated, Platt says. “It got people’s attention for a minute, but it wasn’t enough to get them out, because they weren’t ultimately feeling it, either because of economic insecurity, health reasons, or they have a chip on their shoulder.”
Not even Beyoncé can persuade African Americans disgusted with politics to vote if they are convinced the system has nothing to offer them.
Beyoncé’s proclamation— “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother”—at Harris’s Houston rally in late October rang hollow. Harris needed to break through the country’s political white noise to sideline Donald Trump and hobble his disinformation network. Her campaign decided that the beautiful ones fit the bill. They were certainly prettier than Donald Trump’s nontraditional lineup dominated by macho men and tech gurus.
But the star power on display in these campaign-trail songfests undermined the Democrats by giving the Republicans flesh-and-blood examples of what they considered to be Democratic bicoastal elitism. Not even Beyoncé can persuade African Americans disgusted with politics to vote. A slight majority of white women ended up rallying to the MAGA banner again, Taylor SNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
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