The election was two weeks ago, but as demonstrated by the fire stoked after Kanye West voiced his support for Donald Trump at a concert on Thursday, celebrities’ political leanings in 2016 are still very much a point of fascination. We’ve now (sort of) collected ourselves enough to start asking, “What happened?” in the time since Trump’s shocking win over Hillary Clinton. While political experts will be trying to answer this exact question for years to come, there’s one specific area that may fall lower on the priority list: the role of celebrity endorsements—when they’re pitted against a bulldozing reality TV personality with inherent star power.
Clinton certainly collected an overwhelming amount of them in the run up to November 8. And, not only did stars use their immense platforms to back the Democratic nominee, but they also participated in more candidate-agnostic public-service campaigns urging Americans to vote at all. It’s impossible to directly measure how many votes an Instagram video of Beyoncé telling people “I’m with her” yielded on Election Day, even if it racked up 2.2 million views. There aren’t any exit polls asking if people decided to cast their ballots because of a cheeky, celebrity-filled Rock the Vote video. Without pure, quantifiable data, those that leverage Americans with the largest platforms—entertainers, media personalities, and athletes—must now look for cracks in the machine to find out what went wrong; where they missed opportunities; or if, what Clinton supporters like Lena Dunham said in her P.S.A. (“I’m wondering if I’m hurting her chances of winning.”) proved to be portent rather than parody.
Hollywood does tend to swing to the left, but Clinton, whose campaign actively targeted young people, may have focused on getting and publicizing celebrity endorsements for two reasons. First, stars and “influencers” are already all over social media delivering messages to this cohort. Second, organizations focused primarily on the youth vote see the 18 to 24 demographic as the most sympathetic to their influence. It’s also the least likely to vote, so inspiring messages from their favorite famous figures could, hypothetically, urge them to the polls. Nevertheless, the 2016 election is bearing out to show similar low engagement to results reported in a 2014 study from the U.S. Census Bureau. It found that voting rates among 18- to 24-year-olds in all elections dropped from 50.9 percent in 1964 to 38 percent in 2012. The first election that Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan organization focused on youth-voting advocacy, influenced 1992, and 2008 (when Barack Obama ran for the first time) marked banner years for the age group, but the rate has never returned to 1964 levels. (Vanity Fair reached out to a Clinton representative for comment on this article, but had not heard back prior to publication.)
So, what happened?
Clinton may have been hoping to reproduce Oprah’s momentous impact on Obama’s campaign to secure the Democratic nomination in 2008. Winfrey, talk-show host turned moral center for much of America, formally endorsed Obama in 2007, three months after he announced his candidacy. One study estimated that Winfrey influenced one million voters in favor of Obama in the 2008 democratic primary.
A unique set of circumstances rendered Winfrey’s endorsement both effective and measurably so. She was a credible source of influence, she had not overtly stepped outside her lane as an entertainer before, and she was differentiating between two politicians with similar policies in the same party during its primary. She wasn’t telling Republicans to vote Democrat or vice versa.
Michael Cobb, associate professor of political science at N.C. State, said that this sort of nuance is where celebrity influence can reside. “There’s very little evidence that anyone, let alone celebrities, can convince people in a hyper-partisan age to vote for somebody of the other party,” Cobb said. “That’s just not what they’re being asked to do and that’s not what they can do.”
Oprah was one of the many celebrities to declare “I’m with her” in 2016, but the endorsement didn’t propel Clinton to the presidency. Additionally, after the election when Oprah tweeted that “#HopeLives” after Trump met with Obama in the White House, she was accused of trying to normalize Trump. Clinton and Obama are obviously different candidates, but 2016 seems miles away from 2008. Now, the ever-vigilant Twitterverse is always watching, itching to call out a celebrity on every potential misstep—even Oprah. Cynicism appears to have reached an all-time high when it comes to stars commenting on politics.
Formal celebrity endorsements are not new. Warren G. Harding is often credited with securing the first celebrity endorsements during the 1920 election thanks to support from the Chicago Cubs and film stars like Mary Pickford. John F. Kennedy had the “Rat Pack.” Ronald Reagan had Frank Sinatra.
In the 90s, Rock the Vote worked with MTV on a concerted, deliberate effort to wrangle stars that would speak directly to the youth vote. Madonna wore an American flag and encouraged MTV’s audience to vote by rapping to the tune of “Vogue” about censorship (the original cause of musicians and the youth, by extension). Twenty-five years later, it seems everyone but Taylor Swift is expected to offer their preferred candidate.
The problem is that when everyone from Broadway stars to pop stars to Pretty Little Liars stars do speak out, the noise is deafening—and alienating to voters who don’t want to hear what “Hollywood elites,” whose self-interests differ from their own, think. “In this media environment, I don’t think there’s any one news source or any one influencer or one celebrity that can sway a whole broad swath of people’s points of view,” Ronnie Cho, head of public affairs at MTV and former associate director of public engagement for the White House under Obama said. “A healthy skepticism young people have for people telling them what to do and telling them how to think that makes it harder for even the most followed person on Twitter, like Katy Perry, to turn out people to vote.”
The gulf between celebrity endorsements on the Democratic versus Republican side is stark during every election, but this year, the rift seemed infinite. Hillary Clinton had Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and even Lebron James. #ImWithHer hashtags decorated social output from Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lopez, the Kardashians, and Rihanna, as well as YouTube stars like Tyler Oakley. Clinton carried far and away the majority of celebrity seals of approval.
VIDEO: Which Candidate Had the Best Celebrity Endorsements?
One of the most obvious positive effects of these voices on Democratic campaigns especially is in fund-raising efforts. High-profile gets make collecting money a more efficient proposition. “[Politicians] say, ‘Hey, if you give $20, you get entered into a raffle to have dinner with me, Jay Z, and Beyoncé, or Sarah Jessica Parker, in New York.’ So you’re more likely to give just twenty bucks than you would be if the candidate just said, ‘Hey, give me twenty bucks,’” Cobb said.
Democratic constituents, who have become increasingly savvy as to which region a certain celebrity will make the most impact, know “very well what celebrities are popular more in which areas, and they explicitly coordinate,” according to Cobb. This smart placement perhaps reached its zenith under Clinton, but did it ultimately hurt her? President-elect Trump, after all, had very few conspicuous celebrity endorsements, besides Scott Baio.
“It’s asymmetrical warfare but it doesn’t mean that it’s asymmetrically helpful,” Cobb said. “And that goes back to, again, just because you can get people to come out to your crowd because you’ve got a more popular celebrity doesn’t mean they’re doing anything about voter choice.”
Rock the Vote president Carolyn DeWitt, on the other hand, thinks this flooding technique could prove successful. “Often the more times you reach a person, the more likely they are to take action,” she wrote in an e-mail. The organization relies on Vevo and publishers like MTV to create and distribute compelling storytelling and visuals “that reach voters on an emotional level.”
DeWitt chooses to look on the bright side, counting the inroads RtV made, rather than the votes that never showed. The youth vote “made the difference in key states, races, and ballot measures. Millennials were decisive in both the Nevada and New Hampshire Senate races, and the presidential race in both states as well. Elsewhere, like Michigan, millennials kept the presidential race much closer than it would have been.”
To complete the picture, she rightly notes that you’d have to consider direct and indirect voter suppression. “This was the first presidential election without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act,” she notes. “We saw the effect that that had across the country.”
Many of the celebrity P.S.A.s this year leaned into the idea that no one wants to hear about politics from a Grammy/Oscar/Emmy winner. Lena Dunham’s parody of the earnest P.S.A., “Sensual Pantsuit Anthem,” tried to promote Hillary Clinton and voting through an attempted self-aware rap. Its views were under 500,000.
Rachel Bloom’s “We Are the World”-style short, “Holy Shit (You’ve Got to Vote)”, succeeded in self-awareness were Dunham might have failed. The song (performed by celebrities with varying degrees of fame) covered the importance of voting at the same time that it disavowed a celebrity’s right to give any sort of political advice. Bloom’s intention wasn’t to change any minds. She told Entertainment Weekly, “No Trump voter is getting swayed at this point from a comedy video” (hers was released on November 4, just days before the election). Instead, she said, “If this video motivates one person, especially in a swing state, to just get out there, then it will have been worth it.”
Her video has received about 3.6 million views, but despite earning Funny or Die’s “immortal” rating, its 170 or so comments are riddled with negative detritus. They echo the tone of the “Save the Day Response,” a video made by a Republican ad firm called BrabenderCox, which answered Avengers director Joss Whedon’s “Save the Day” voter P.S.A., featuring Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson, among others. The stars never name names, but when Don Cheadle refers to “a racist, abusive coward who could permanently damage the fabric of our society,” viewers can extrapolate.
BrabenderCox’s video leaned on the same idea as Bloom’s—that celebrities should stay in their lane—but with added snark. The Hollywood Reporter points out that far-right Republican heavyweights from Sean Hannity to Glenn Beck tweeted the video, and it garnered about 14 million views before the election. In the same story, THR delved into the behind-the-scenes work that rallied a constituency that’s highly suspicious of the overwhelmingly liberal Hollywood.
Which brings us to the limits of celebrity endorsements and P.S.A. efforts when they run up against the unfortunate runaway success of a celebrity candidate. “Ted Nugent shows up at a Trump thing, and he’ll grab his crotch and yell about something, but that’s not why people are there. They’re there for Trump,” Cobb said, noting it’s something that research on the subject will have to consider moving forward. “I’ve always thought that credibility is the main specific—that is, you have to have some evidence you know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Trump challenges that . . . [O]bjectively that there’s very little evidence he knows much about what he’s about to do, and at least an equal amount of people made peace with that.”
In other words, all of the behavioral research in the world couldn’t stop a single star from glowing orange and cutting through the celebrity noise. He removes middleman when it comes to endorsements. Instead of the transitive property of Katy Perry (“I’m a Katy Perry fan; Katy Perry is a Hillary Clinton fan; I’m a Hillary Clinton fan), there’s the much simpler “I’m a Trump fan” equation, for better or worse.
