Poor old Bruce Springsteen. The legendary rocker bet the farm on an endorsement of Kamala Harris and may well have alienated about half his audience as a result. The ‘Boss’ who had built his career on empathising with the hard-grafting, blue-collar, Bud-swilling ‘deplorables’ with his anthems of white working-class alienation, recorded a folksy recommendation from the counter of a (real or staged – who knows?) diner. ‘Freedom, social justice, equal opportunity, the right to love who you want’ are on the ballot, pleaded Springsteen, adding that Trump’s ‘disdain for the constitution’ should disqualify him from office.
Harrison Ford followed suit in two ads run just before polling day. The Star Wars actor summoned the force to warn us of ‘the other guy’ (Trump’s name doesn’t sully his speech) ‘…embracing dictators and tyrants around the world’. ‘For goodness sake, don’t do this again’, pleaded Ford, advice that he might have been better taking himself when he was mulling over whether to make that fifth Indiana Jones film.
At best such endorsements seem to have had a negligible effect and at worst may even have hurt Kamala’s chances
A tearful Jennifer Lopez outraged at a comedian’s (not Trump’s) joke about her beloved Puerto Rico (she was born in New York) emoted about how ‘we should be emotional. We should be upset. We should be scared and outraged. We should – our pain matters. We matter. You matter. Your voice and your vote matters’. Lady Gaga who implored us to ‘vote like your life depends on it, or your children’s lives depend on it, because they do’ in 2020 was prominent again this time performing in swing state rallies for the Democrat candidate.
Then, of course, there was Oprah Winfrey, who seems to exists on her own super-terrestrial plane of celebrity these days, a sort of deity who appears now and again in outfits not of this world, to make vital interventions and save us all from our human follies. Oprah swooped to Kamala’s aid a couple of times, most recently to warn Americans that if Trump wins ‘it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again’. (How so? – not explained)
The list goes on and on and is glittering and impressively multi-generational: Di Caprio, Clooney, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Eminem, Beyonce, Usher, Pink, Olivia Rodrigo, and Madonna all weighed in for Kamala. And most importantly of all perhaps, the holy grail of celebrity imprimatur was secured last month with the ‘perfect and powerful…exquisite…flawless’ (according to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnel) written endorsement of stadium galactico and ‘childless cat lady’ (her words) Taylor Swift.
Kamala had so much celebrity glitter thrown over her that she seemed to exist inside a kind of just shuffled glittery snow globe. A whole posse of top billing female actresses (Roberts, Witherspoon, Cher) moved by her defence of ‘female reproductive freedom’ (also known as abortion) flanked their heroine like outriders on her righteous progress to the White House. Meanwhile, Trump had Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan.
It was extreme, but it is in the tradition of US politics. Celebrity endorsements have been a part of political campaigning in the US at least as far back as the 1920s when the singer Al Jolson endorsed Warren Harding but became much more important in the age of television. Frank Sinatra’s serenading of JFK with the Democrat theme song ‘High Hopes’ was a famous example. Since then, there have been some weird match ups, like Elvis appearing to back Nixon, Muhammad Ali supporting Ronald Reagan or Chuck Norris endorsing George W Bush.
But has there ever been any evidence that this hobnobbing has worked? Maybe, a little, but the calculations are difficult. Oprah Winfrey is credited with boosting Barack Obama’s chances in the Democratic primary of 2007/8 against Hilary Clinton, helping him win over 1 million votes (the so-called ‘Oprah effect’). And Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris is believed to have led to 400,000 engagements with the US government voter registration website.
But it is difficult to gauge how many of those Swiftie clicks led to actual registrations or votes, and impossible to know how many voters were influenced the other way – perhaps irritated enough by a smug celebrity’s arrogant or hectoring appeal to push them to vote for his or her opponent (what you might call the Eddie Izzard effect). A recent UK example of a failed celeb intervention is David Tennant’s trashing of Kemi Badenoch, which doesn’t seem to have done the new Tory leader any harm at all.
The US election suggests it may be time to call time on celebrity endorsements. At best they seem to have had a negligible effect and at worst may even have hurt Kamala’s chances. The assumption that people are dumb enough to be swayed by the recommendations of the super-rich and famous, whose everyday concerns (the colour of their new Lamborghini perhaps, or choice of suite at the Four Seasons) are beyond the most fantastical imaginings of the vast majority of their fans, seems increasingly implausible. For many it may be just a case of ‘who cares?’
This may come as highly unpleasant news to those celebs, who have to face to up to, not just a Trump presidency, but the awful realisation that they are neither as important, or as loved, as they think they are. Poor things.
To paraphrase JK Rowling’s perfect riposte to David Tennant: our thoughts and prayers are with the showbiz elite at this difficult time.
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