Maybe Vice President Kamala Harris will follow in Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s footsteps and write a tell-all book explaining how it all happened, but before the dust settles, we would be remiss not to point out how poorly Harris weaponized pop culture.
Celebrity Rehab
For one thing, Harris made a fatal mistake by not appearing on the number-one podcast in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience. This was a possibility for a moment, according to Rogan, who tweeted on Oct. 28, “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”It would have been significantly advantageous for Harris to make that trek and devote three hours to the interview. Trump did, and as of Thursday, the video of that interview has 46 million hits on YouTube. Harris did an hour-long interview with Howard Stern before that, and that video has only 1.8 million views. Good to see she allocated her time effectively!
It’s hard to imagine that the Stern interview earned Harris any converts. Stern had a dedicated following of young men back in the 1990s. Rogan has a dedicated following of young men now, and they are notoriously of independent political persuasion. And love him or hate him, Rogan is putty in the hands of anyone he interviews; if Harris had done it right, Rogan would have been singing her praises, thereby softening the blow of his endorsement of Trump.
Instead, the Harris campaign exhibited hubris in the subliminal contention that Rogan needed her more than she needed him, which was patently just not true. So she decided she couldn’t fly to Austin and devote three hours to the interview.
Not that Texas was a significant detour for Harris — after all, she wasn’t too busy to host a Houston rally that same week with Beyoncé and Willie Nelson. Despite both artists being celebrated Texas icons, it didn't make a dent in Texas’ election results Tuesday night.
Indeed, it appears that Harris’ momentum had a meteoric fall from grace in the world of pop culture. Sure, Charli XCX's declaration that “Kamala IS Brat” was quite a peacock feather in her cap, and Taylor Swift's endorsement after the debate with Trump appeared to have a noticeable impact.
Otherwise, the endorsements came mostly from the usual suspects: George Clooney, Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey, among others. These celebrities have offered presidential endorsements for decades and have been nothing if not predictable about it. If we’re being honest with ourselves, these endorsements changed virtually no minds at all. That many of them are A-listers is beside the point: this race came down to working-class people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and it’s hard to imagine that a sanitation worker in Bensalem Township would have made the ideological leap to Harris even if that person were a fan of any of these celebrities (a big “if,” in some respects).
It wasn’t just the A-listers, either: Harris rubbed elbows with has-beens and laughingstocks such as Katy Perry and Lance Bass. (If you’re in the market for some good ol’ cringe, watch Harris and Bass saying “Bye. Bye. Bye.” to Trump.)
@kamalaharris Ain’t no lie @Lance Bass ♬ sonido original - Kandy ZT
However, in fairness to Harris, her media game was not completely out-of-touch and off-kilter. She appeared on one of the largest podcasts today (Call Her Daddy), and Mark Cuban was a valuable endorsement because of his Pittsburgh origins and appeal to steadfast capitalists. For different reasons, the same value can be attributed to rappers Eminem and Megan Thee Stallion.
But the pop culture war was ultimately lost to Trump, who came with a larger celebrity arsenal this time around. Among his quiver were Caitlyn Jenner, Jake Paul, Amber Rose, Brett Favre and Mike Tyson.
The days of Trump’s only music bona fides coming from Kid Rock and Ted Nugent are over, as he scored endorsements from rappers Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, Swae Lee, Fivio Foreign, Chief Keef and 42 Dugg. (The first two received pardons from Trump, and although Sexyy Red initially endorsed him, she later endorsed Harris.)
The news of his Puerto Rico comment overshadowed the entire event, but comedian Tony Hinchliffe has one of the largest podcasts in the country (Kill Tony), and his endorsement of Trump no doubt carried some weight. Ditto for another juggernaut podcast, This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, which hosted Trump two months ago. That video hasn’t done Rogan numbers, but 14 million hits in two months is nonetheless an impressive feat.
Meanwhile, Harris couldn’t even make a dent in the declining radio market. Shortly before the election, she appeared for a town hall on The Breakfast Club, a show that draws only 4 million terrestrial listeners in 80 syndication markets — peanuts compared to the listenership conservative talk radio hosts draw. Even the full video of Harris’ interview with Charlamagne Tha God has only 575,000 views on YouTube, which is simply abysmal.
We can also delve into Harris’s appearances on talk shows The View and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but we’ll just say that viewership hasn’t improved on those fronts either.
So what have we learned? For one thing, voters have grown accustomed to the same old celebrities endorsing the nominee of their respective party, even if they like those celebrities. Democrats were too smug with their pop cultural hegemony and too busy flaunting their celebrity laurels to notice some surprising celebrity deflections to Trump. Podcasts are the prevailing medium in today’s world, and Trump ultimately outperformed Harris on this front while Harris treaded water on Howard Stern’s show like it was 1998. To that point, Joe Rogan was a crucial lifeline whose importance Harris completely underestimated.
These takeaways plainly demonstrate that Democrats need to adapt to today’s pop culture and reach people where they are now, not where they once were. Kamala may be Brat, but as Charli XCX herself declared, Brat Summer is over forever. Perhaps we should have listened.
So what?
The question ultimately remains whether celebrity endorsements make a difference. Research and other developments appear to have answered this in the affirmative. A 2012 article by economists Craig Garthwaite and Timothy J. Moore in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization found that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama had an effect of roughly 1 million votes in the 2008 Democratic primary.A more recent study by political scientists David J. Jackson, Anthony Nownes and Thomas Norton for Fordham University gauged Taylor Swift’s political influence by experimenting with her hypothetical endorsement. The study divided surveyed participants into two groups: one was asked, “How do you feel about the following statement? Parents and teachers should have an equal say in deciding which books to include in high school libraries,” and the other was asked, “Taylor Swift believes that parents and teachers should have an equal say in deciding which books to include in high school libraries. How do you feel about this?”
The Swiftie group was more likely to be either neutral or in agreement than the non-Swiftie group, the study found. This tracks with recent reports that one of Swift’s Instagram stories drew over 400,000 visitors to the vote.org website.
But Swift is not the only pop leviathan with a political impact. Variety reported on Tuesday that Sabrina Carpenter registered more than 35,000 people to vote during her 2024 tour through her partnership with HeadCount, shattering previous records.
So, yes, it makes a difference.
This difference has been long understood, too, given the traditional nexus between celebrity branding and electoral politicking. John F. Kennedy had Frank Sinatra. Dwight Eisenhower had Hank Williams. Franklin D. Roosevelt had Olivia de Havilland.
The advent of celebrity culture as we know it in the early 20th century gave rise to what is considered the first presidential endorsement: vaudevillian, actor and singer Al Jolson for Warren G. Harding. Jolson even performed a campaign song for Harding called “Harding, You’re the Man for Us.” In the late '20s, Babe Ruth led a highly publicized campaign blitz for Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith, who ultimately lost to Republican Herbert Hoover.
And none of these people called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
