By Variety | Created at 2024-11-11 03:05:53 | Updated at 2024-11-18 04:31:00
1 week ago
Did you know that Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé lost the election for Kamala Harris? Or at least bear a large part of the responsibility for her party’s failure at the polls this year? It’s true, you know! — at least if you listen to some of the punditry coming from conservatives, and even from some Democratic operatives eager to find some celebs to push into the middle of their current circular firing squad. Listening to some of these voices, you’d think that Harris could have won six or seven swing states, if only Beyoncé hadn’t shown up to deliver one single four-minute rally speech, or if Taylor Swift hadn’t devoted a singular 300-word Instagram post to a Harris endorsement. Imagine the more favorable electoral counts if only some of the most beloved pop-culture figures in the world had kept their dirty traps shut, right?
This isn’t much of an exaggeration of some of the post-election sniping out there. “A-list celebrity endorsements boomerang on Harris, Democrats,” read the headline of a reported news story in The Hill on Saturday. Overseas, the Guardian ran a Wednesday-morning-quarterbacking piece titled: “Did celebrity endorsements actually harm Kamala Harris?” Some right-leaning publications actually declared that the whole idea of artists and entertainers speaking up had suddenly just been killed in its tracks, apparently never to be seen again, in 2028 or any time after. “Kamala Harris and the death of the celebrity endorsement,” read a headline in the Spectator in the U.K., echoed by an equally breathless piece in the New York Post titled: “How Kamala Harris killed the celebrity endorsement — parading A-listers over policies was always a recipe for disaster.”
Musicians and actors and their ilk: they “had a marvelous time ruining everything” in this election cycle, to quote one of the most famous of these endorsers. More succinctly, to the tune of “Blame Canada”: Blame Hollywood. (Or New Jersey, or Nashville, or wherever all those pesky singers come from.)
There is good reason to believe the argument that people in the arts and entertainment speaking up does not move the needle a tremendous amount. But concurrent with that argument is the reasonable belief that they can move it at least a tiny amount, in registrations and motivation, if not 180-degree turns. The idea that entertainers and artists’ involvement somehow leads to actual voter dissuasion is a fantasy — bullshit that is happily perpetrated by the “go woke, go broke” crowd, and picked up by columnists who think that picking on limousine liberals never goes out of style. (It really doesn’t.) It’s just disappointing to see this picked up by objective journalists and by some Democrats themselves, who imagine they have practical reasons to tell the entertainment world to shut up and sing.
The biggest fallacy is that the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz campaign was somehow lazily “reliant” on stars to get their message across. The Hill quoted an anonymous “Democratic strategist” as saying: “Somehow we think if Beyoncé is on stage, that will solve all our problems.” Note to nameless strategist: literally no one thought that. And maybe the proof of that is that Bey made a single one-and-done appearance for the ticket, in her hometown of Houston. If anything, up until the final week of furious stumpimg, the campaign and entertainers themselves played it lower-key this year, having some real mindfulness about possible perceptions of this being a Hollywood-driven movement. The Democratic convention had about the same number of musical interludes as the Republican, and not because they couldn’t book more. Even then, the couple of songs per night were handed to musicians who represented something symbolic — a Jason Isbell, or Mickey Guyton, or Stevie Wonder — more than bringing in the pop superstars of the moment. Everyone remembers how Beyoncé did not show up to overshadow Harris in her big moment, though the media were convinced she would. In the last couple of weeks, the big guns did come out more in person… but does anyone in the chattering class really believe that a last-minute get-out-the-vote rally is ill-served by the promise that attendees might get to hear “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “The One I Love,” “Firework” or “Edge of Glory” as a reward for standing in the cold for five hours?
Of course, pop singers in particular face damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t reactions for doing either too little or too much. Swift was hectored by elements of one side for not giving a Harris endorsement, then pilloried for elements of the other when she did give one… with the see-saw swinging back toward “Why is she not saving democracy by going to Pennsylvania?” An article in The Cut on election eve, after it was clear the superstar was headed to cheer on the Chiefs, bore the damning headline: “Taylor Swift Chose Football Over Kamala Harris.” So much was read into that: Maybe she was fearful over alienating more Republican fans than she already had, or maybe she really likes her boyfriend. Or maybe she had the sense, as a lot of artists did this year, that moderation in politicking is fine, and a little goes a long way.
But for those who did put themselves out there with public appearances in the final stretch… Does anyone imagine there was a single undecided voter left in Pennsylvania who was leaning slightly toward the left, and then, upon seeing Lady Gaga cover a patriotic Irving Berlin standard, thought, “‘Joker’ sucked, that’s it — MAGA forever”? Anyone who truly resents entertainers taking a political side has in nearly every case already picked a side… and it is the side of Kevin Sorbo being the only trustworthy star in Hollywood. Pop stars alienate, for certain — they further alienate those whose alienation from artists having a real-world voice is long-standing, deeply rooted and intractable.
Whether celebrities budged any significant needles this election is hard to quantify — but it’s wrong to discount it. You can at least raise the possibility the results would have been a little worse for Democrats without the majority of the arts world clearly standing on one side. David Plouffe, a top adviser to the Harris campaign, got in hot water and had to delete his X account after posting that her staff “left it all on the field for their country. We dug out of a deep hole but not enough.” Perhaps it was impolite to the Biden camp to say the quiet part out loud, but few could doubt that Harris started deeply from behind, and that her taking over the ticket was a Hail Mary pass from the outset, whatever right or wrong choices were subsequently made along the way.
And so we can look at what few actual measurements we have of entertainers having an impact and wonder if there was more along these lines than imagined. In the run-up to the election, it was reported that Sabrina Carpenter had, through HeadCount logged 35,814 voter registrations through her efforts to engage on tour… and got an additional 263,087 voters to engage outside of registering (i.e., checking their registration status or polling location). More than a hundred other artists working with HeadCount had smaller tallies that may add up at the local level. Many of these registrations, certainly, had to come on the Republican side, although fans have an idea where Carpenter or Green Day or Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande stands. That’s as it should be. And after Swift used her Instagram post in October to send fans to the nonpartisan Vote.org, the site counted 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period, which was a little more than came in for the entire month of August.
Then there were phenomena like the Swifties4Kamala grass-roots movement. Did it produce a national groundswell? No, but it’s far from inconceivable that these newly engaged young voters, and others similarly motivated by hearing from their heroes, made a difference in local elections.
In the end, it’s not just about newbie registrations or political conversions — it’s about inspiration for the already committed, too, and salve. Those who already knew who they were going to vote for don’t cherish the memory of hearing Isbell sing “Hope the High Road,” Springsteen do “Land of Hope and Dreams” or Gaga perform “God Bless America” any less for the electoral loss. And in the wake of the national defeat, there’s a sense of feeling less alone and ready to move forward even in some of the tweets that have gone out. Watching Eilish dedicate “Your Power” to disheartened women the night after the election is re-heartening. Even having Bette Midler tweet out a lengthy, trenchant H.L. Mencken quote — basically, as gallows humor — can feel a little healing, even if it’s a big Hollywood celebrity and not your personal BFF sending it through.
Whether it has any effect or not, everyone has to answer the question for themslves, if not their children: “What did you do in the war, daddy?” Imagine feeling — as Bruce Springsteen did — that “Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime,” and then stifling that because of what the New York Post or the twits on Elon Musk’s platform might write.
Not everyone in music or Hollywood should feel the requirement to speak up, now or in the future, any more than they should feel the pressure to shut up. I often think back to interviewing Willie Nelson during the thick of the 2004 election and asking how political he felt comfortable being, given his well-known liberal-leaning convictions. “I think it’s important that we have a change in the direction our country is going,” he told me at the time. “But I sing to Democrats and Republicans every night. I don’t want to do or say anything that’s going to make half of my crowd get up and leave the building. Because the election’s over November the 2nd, and November the 3rd, I’m still gonna be out there on the highway.”
I could imagine the “shut up and sing” crowd applauding those sentiments of Nelson’s as good, common sense for an entertainer. But there’s a big asterisk to Willie explaining why he doesn’t take big stands in concert. If you’ll notice, he’s out there, Texas election after Texas election, supporting Democratic candidates… even when at the state level, they usually lose. He also shared the bill with Bey in Houston for Harris this year. He’s not going to rub his convictions in your face every night, but neither is he going to be America’s trained monkey and tuck them away altogether. So, two years or four years from now, when entertainers and political parties have to face these choices again, it may be as reasonable as it always is to pose the question: What Would Willie Do?
