Who Lost the 2024 Election? Celebrities

The media spent months pre-hyping Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. In its aftermath, stories claimed that the lip-synching sensation’s Instagram post drove half a million fans to not only buy overpriced merchandise, but to register to vote in the 2024 election.

The Kamala campaign embraced ‘Brat’ branding based on an album from a British half-Muslim pop star few Americans ever heard of. It brought out Beyonce to campaign (crucially not to sing) for Kamala who had tried to model her fanbase, the KHive, on Beyonce’s rabid Beyhive fans.

Kamala brought Oprah and Lady Gaga to Philly and Katy Perry to Pittsburgh. Julia Roberts cut an ad telling women to hide their votes from their husbands. In Michigan, white wife-killing enthusiast rapper Eminem headlined a Kamala rally while Obama rapped the opening of his ‘Lose Yourself’ (unintentionally revealing that he’s just as authentically black as Eminem.)

Bruce Springsteen shuffled out to perform at an Obama event for Kamala in Philly. The Kamala campaign brought Megan Thee Stallion to rap in Atlanta, dragged out what was left of the (Dixie) Chicks to the DNC and Lizzo to Detroit. Even the most faded has-beens like Lance Bass of NSYNC and Jennifer Aniston of Friends were tagged to shill for Kamala. Any celeb with even the slightest name recognition, past, present or future, was tasked with getting out the vote.

And the American people responded with a massive landslide which won not only the election, but the popular vote, for the man that all the celebrities had warned them not to vote for.

“This was really an historic, flawlessly run campaign,” Joy Reid raved on MSNBC. “Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She had every prominent celebrity voice, she had Taylor Swift, the Swifties, she had Beyonce, the Beyhive, you could not have run a better campaign.”

Reid’s answer was that America was racist. But maybe Americans just hate celebrities?

If celebrity endorsements drove elections, America would have been run by Democrats since the Kennedy administration except for a two term Romney presidency. Apart from some immature teenagers and mentally ill people who not only pay $500 a pop to listen to a pop star lip sync music written by AI but actually build their identities around being their fans, most people view celebrities as entertainers not as moral authorities or thought leaders.

Americans don’t vote the way celebrities tell them to, but they just might vote against them.

Celebrity endorsements for insurance, mobile phone plans or candidates drive attention to the product, rather than unqualified enthusiasm for it. Advertisers understand this, the Kamala campaign didn’t. The attempt to build an armor of celebrities around Kamala was an insecure attempt to replicate Obama’s cult following without having any of the charisma. Obama cultivated celebrities because he successfully convinced 2008 voters that he was one.

Kamala could never convince anyone that she was a celebrity. Her charisma level would about suffice for a publicist or a receptionist, and yet she very badly wanted to be the biggest star. Gathering celebrities around her didn’t make her seem bigger, the way it did Obama, instead it made her appear smaller. It drove attention to the product. And the product was not competitive.

‘Brat’ and ‘Joy’ didn’t become Kamala’s ‘Hope and Change’. Building a wall of celebrities only briefly made her candidacy appear like a movement before everyone got a look inside. The interviews shattered the idea that Kamala was anything special. Whatever intangible quality makes ordinary people into stars wasn’t there. All that was there was a great emptiness.

Surrounded by celebrities, Kamala just looked like the dictator of a former Soviet republic who could pay $10 million to get Beyonce to perform at her birthday party. A country suffering from economic insecurity watched the spectacle of a billion dollar campaign throwing money around (while constantly texting supporters to demand another $5 (with monthly auto-renew)) to throw a party for the lamest little rich girl on earth while they were having trouble buying gas and bread.

The public likes celebrities to be entertaining. Trump bringing out Hulk Hogan was entertaining. Kamala summoning Beyonce, Springsteen or Lizzo to lecture on abortion, sexism, democracy and racism was about as much fun as falling asleep to NPR. The Kamala campaign had tried the ‘joy’ brand, but its celebrity entourage was a joyless assemblage of flickering star wattage.

Celebrities can’t make a bad product good, but they can make everyone hate it. And by the time they were done, most of the country had decided that they were not voting for Kamala.

Smart agents make sure that their clients don’t endorse bad products unless their careers are already on the way down. And smarter agents and celebrities kept their distance from the Kamala trainwreck. Even Taylor Swift kept it predictably coy, avoiding actual Kamala rallies, and delivering just the minimum amount of woke to keep her rabid fan base from canceling her.

Celebrities devalued Kamala and she devalued them. When all was said and done, intangible clout and hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent to launch the equivalent of New Coke. As Kamala sets out on her march to obscurity, the celebrities who celebrated her have also lost some of their wattage. The idea of the celebrity political endorsement is as dead as her career.

And deservedly so.

The Dixie Chicks complained during the Iraq War that people just wanted them to “shut up and sing”. But most people rightfully want entertainers to entertain them. Celebrities want to believe that they’re more important than they actually are. They’re not. Famous is not important. The ability to command attention is not the same thing as having your views taken seriously.

Making the jump from celebrity to leader, as Reagan did, requires thinking seriously about ideas and engaging with how people actually think and live. It also means leaving behind a wider audience that wants to hear you sing for a narrower one that wants to hear what you think.

At a Kamala rally in Atlanta, Megan Thee Stallion yelled out, “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for.”

Democrats have long rallied on these kinds of mindless celebrity shout-outs, but they do nothing except convince the public that both the candidate and the celebrity are hopelessly out of touch.

In a miserable economy, no one was turning to millionaires and billionaires for voting guidance. When times are hard, all the public wants of celebrities is to shut up and sing. And they couldn’t even do that.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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