Jesse Rifkin
| Special to the Washington Post
Donald Trump recently touted Taylor Swift’s endorsement of his presidential campaign – except that the pop superstar had done no such thing, and the images Trump had reposted on Truth Social were generated by AI. Still, real celebrity presidential endorsements have rarely been more prominent than in recent weeks.
Some of the buzziest moments at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions came from celebrities. At the Democratic convention, rapper Lil Jon performed a version of his song “Get Low” that namechecked Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Meanwhile, at the Republican convention, wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped apart his shirt during his speech to reveal a Trump-Vance T-shirt underneath.
How did we get here? Celebrity presidential endorsements are actually more than a century in the making.
The practice might have started in 1920. That year, a coterie of silent film stars including Al Jolson and Mary Pickford endorsed Republican candidate Warren G. Harding.
Chicago ad agency Lord & Thomas essentially created the concept of the celebrity endorsement, at the behest of the agency’s Republican head, Albert Lasker. He even arranged a visit with 70 stars from the theater and film worlds to Harding’s house in Marion, Ohio, to sing the original song “Harding, You’re the Man for Us.”
Harding nearly landed another major endorsement that year. Baseball star Babe Ruth was offered $4,000 to endorse him, and Ruth tentatively agreed, despite his Democratic leanings. (It was a substantial sum: For comparison, Ruth earned a $10,000 salary that season.) But after the “Black Sox” game-fixing scandal became public later that year, Ruth – though uninvolved – backed off.
In 1928, Ruth endorsed Democrat Al Smith for president. But in retirement, “The Babe” became a political switch-hitter. In 1944, Ruth praised Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a great man” but argued that Republican candidate Thomas Dewey was the “new pitcher” the White House needed. Ruth even spoke at Dewey’s election-eve rally in Madison Square Garden.
Ruth wasn’t the only celebrity to shift party allegiances.
In that same 1944 election, singer Frank Sinatra endorsed Roosevelt, while fellow crooner Bing Crosby stumped for Dewey. Sinatra also rerecorded a version of his song “High Hopes” with new lyrics supporting John F. Kennedy’s 1960 bid.
But in 1980, Sinatra endorsed Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. “I think he’s the proper man to be the president of the United States because it’s so screwed up now that we need somebody to straighten it out,” Sinatra explained during the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. “I have been a registered Democrat most of my life, but I choose the man or the woman running.”
Baseball star Jackie Robinson endorsed Republicans for years, including Richard M. Nixon in 1960. Nixon’s opponent, Kennedy, “wouldn’t look me straight in the eye,” Robinson said, and “knew little or nothing about Black problems and sensibilities.”
By 1968, though, Robinson had turned on Nixon due to the race-baiting campaign tactics of his “Southern Strategy.” That year, Robinson endorsed unsuccessful Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. In that way, Major League Baseball’s first Black player mirrored African Americans’ broader move to the Democratic Party in the 1960s.
Other celebrities have even switched party endorsements within the same election cycle.
Former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali had always endorsed Democrats, and in 1980 he dryly endorsed Carter by calling him “the right White for the presidency.” In 1984, he initially supported Jesse Jackson’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination.
But after Jackson dropped out, Ali surprised observers by refusing to back Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, instead endorsing Reagan’s reelection. “He’s keeping God in schools,” Ali explained, “and that’s enough.”
Before Trump was receiving presidential endorsements, he was bestowing them – and also once flipped his party support within the same year.
At the time a tabloid fixture and host of the reality show “The Apprentice,” Trump originally endorsed Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful bid for 2008’s Democratic nomination. “She’d make a good president,” Trump said, calling her “very talented” and “terrific.”
After she lost to Barack Obama, though, Trump flipped to Republican candidate John McCain for the general election. McCain is “a great guy, a tremendous guy,” Trump told CNN’s Larry King in announcing his endorsement. “I’ve known him for a long time.” (Trump, of course, would turn on both Clinton and McCain in the years ahead.)
But 2008’s most prominent celebrity endorsement went to Obama.
Television personality Oprah Winfrey had famously never endorsed a presidential candidate during her two-decade-plus career. “I haven’t done it in the past because I haven’t felt that (I knew) anybody well enough to be able to say, ‘I believe in this person,’” she acknowledged. That changed when she endorsed Obama.
Economists Craig Garthwaite and Timothy J. Moore estimated that Winfrey’s endorsement – along with her campaign appearances and featuring him on her show – gave Obama 1 million additional Democratic primary votes.
Winfrey subsequently endorsed Democrats Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, all after they’d already secured the Democratic nods.
After Winfrey, Taylor Swift became the most popular celebrity non-endorser turned endorser, after years as a political blank space.
As late as 2017, journalists devoted full-length magazine articles to guessing the singer’s politics. She’d posted a photo of herself on Election Day 2016 in line to vote … but for whom? Did her shoulderless sweater in the picture deliberately resemble a shoulderless dress Clinton once wore back in 1993? Caught between dueling fanbases of conservative country music listeners and progressive millennials, Swift would seemingly “never ever ever” reveal her ideology.
But in 2018, she finally broke her silence to endorse political candidates for the first time: two Democrats in her home state of Tennessee. (Her House of Representatives pick won, but her Senate candidate lost.) By 2020, she was fully invested in the presidential race, tweeting criticisms of Trump, endorsing Biden in a V Magazine cover story and baking “Biden 2020” cookies.
So, the million-dollar question – or, in Ruth’s case, the $4,000 question: Do celebrity presidential endorsements actually matter in a general election?
Perhaps not. In summer 2016, many people lampooned the comparative star power at the two major party conventions. Democrats featured A-listers from Meryl Streep to Katy Perry to Stephen Colbert, while Republicans couldn’t land a bigger celebrity than Scott Baio from “Happy Days” and Antonio Sabato Jr. from “General Hospital.” Yet we all remember which party won.
Source link : https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2024/08/31/a-history-of-celebrity-presidential-endorsements-from-babe-ruth-to-taylor-swift/75036956007/
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Publish date : 2024-08-31 14:02:00
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