That’s the fascinating question being posed across the US mainstream media, social media and beyond, including the UK. If America is truly the land of celebrity power and influence, then Kamala Harris is already guaranteed the White House by virtue of the famous name endorsement count.
A trivial point? Maybe. Maybe not. Some political analysts and pollsters, together with a Harvard University research project, estimate that celeb endorsements can add as much as 3 or 4 points to a presidential candidate’s vote share. A figure which could be decisive in what remains a tight race, particularly in the seven crucial, finely balanced swing states that hold the key to whether Harris makes history as the first female president or Donald Trump does so as the first convicted criminal POTUS.
While there is little doubt Harris will win the popular vote nationally by a sizeable margin, those seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — are in reality the only ones that matter under the US electoral college system.
It is the reason why, in the wake of two somewhat unconventional party conventions, plenty of political campaign planning has and will continue to be on maximising celebrity support, particularly among A-listers. Guaranteed, too, to attract massive media attention globally as well as across the US itself.
Certainly, Kamala Harris scored far better on that front at the DNC in Chicago with music superstars Stevie Wonder, Pink and John Legend among those who performed along with such political A-lister speakers as the Obamas and the Clintons and a rousing oratorical display from Oprah Winfrey. While rumours that both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift would turn up at the convention proved wrong, both are expected to officially endorse Harris within days. To accentuate Harris’s Gen-Z appeal, rap superstars Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Jon also performed to support her.
Legal threats
Already, Beyoncé and her lawyers are locked in a dispute with the Trump campaign over their use of her song ‘Freedom’ — which she has donated for use as the Harris campaign theme song — at one of his rallies while Taylor Swift is considering action over Trump’s reposting of a fake AI-generated video of her endorsing him. They are unlikely to be placated by the subsequent Trump team claim it was a “satirical” joke reposting with one Trump spokesman telling me: “No one in their right mind would think Taylor Swift was supporting us, so it was obviously just a bit of fun.” That said, The Donald would almost certainly give his electoral right arm to have Swift’s backing and would be cock-a-hoop if any ‘Swifties’ were fooled into thinking the footage was genuine.
Trump is also facing ‘cease and desist’ legal action from rock legends The Foo Fighters and the family of the late soul legend Isaac Hayes over the unauthorised use of their music on the campaign trail. The former stressing they don’t support Trump, object to his use of their hit song, ‘My Hero’ while the latter on the same grounds object to his use of Hayes classic composition, ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’. It echoes a long list of unauthorised objections during previous Trump campaign by the likes of Adele, Beyoncé, Rihanna, the Stones, Prince, Neil Young, Queen, REM, Guns N’ Roses, Elton John and Pharrell Williams.
Who’s endorsing who
By comparison to the Harris/Walz Chicago ‘love-in’, the celeb roll call at Trump’s earlier RNC in Milwaukee didn’t measure up with veteran TV wrestler Hulk Hogan delivering a keynote speech, Trump’s ‘favourite singer’ Lee Greenwood performing, comic Kid Rock on stage and accused sex pest Brit comedian Russell Brand doing two convention fringe shows.
Overall, Harris is miles ahead on big name celeb support with George Clooney, Ariana Grande, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, Katy Perry, Jane Fonda, Jamie Lee Curtis, Olivia Rodrigo, Cardi B, Eva Longoria, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Stiller, Cynthia Nixon, Ru Paul just a few of those who have already publicly pledged their support. While the billionaire tech tycoon and TV personality Mark Cuban pledged his support via Forbes magazine and is seen by some Democrat strategists as a ‘rational counter’ to Trump’s heavy dependence on Elon Musk. More major names are to be strategically rolled out in support of the Harris/Waalz ticket as the campaign builds up ahead of November 5th election date. Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio believed to be among them.
To date, Elon Musk apart, Donald Trump can only publicly call on Hulk Hogan, Roseanne Barr, Kid Rock, rapper Amber Rose, actor Stephen Baldwin (younger brother of Alec who memorably impersonated Trump on Saturday Night Live) and rap superstar Lil Wayne, who backed him in 2020 and benefited when one of Trump’s last acts on losing was to give him a presidential pardon on the gun charges he was facing! Acting superstars Jon Voight and Dennis Quaid have traditionally come out for The Donald but have so far been quiet in the 2024 campaign.
Behind the scenes, the Trump campaign is desperately trying to drum up more celebrity support from conservative leaning figures. Although research shows registered Republican voters are a little less influenced by celebrity endorsements than their Democrat counterparts, the 40% of the US electorate classed as non-aligned and open to persuasion can be influenced.
Good sources report that Trump himself has been seething at the scale of Harris’s celebrity support and is known to be complaining to aides that it’s contributing to her “sucking up the media oxygen” — something he’s always regarded as his preserve. Some of his own advisers privately suggest it partly explains those unhinged sounding outbursts (often all in capitals) on his Truth Social platform branding Harris ‘dumb’, a ‘Commie’ and claiming large crowd turnouts for her and witnessed and broadcast by the media are “AI generated fakes” with no one really there!
In addition, Trump is rattled by a post-Biden fundraising surge for the Harris/Walz ticket at almost double the rate for his own campaign. It leaves him unduly reliant on a handful of ultra conservative billionaire donors, especially Elon Musk.
Could make the difference
All of this has produced serious media focus on a new research study by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation which finds that celebrities do more than generate an online and MSM ‘buzz’ — they can actually influence an election outcome. It argues “there is rigorous evidence that celebrity voices are incredibly powerful in altering polling numbers.
“Right now, young voters have relatively low levels of trust in a lot of leaders and institutions, including traditional news media — but celebrities are often a rare exception”, says the study’s lead author, political scientist Ashley Spillane, flagging up that America ranks 31st out of the top 50 developed nations in terms of eligible voter participation.
She added: “Voting should be the trendy, cool thing to do. In terms of shifting this non-participation culture, celebrities are uniquely positioned to empower everyday Americans. Online voter registration and poll worker volunteer rates are found to increase when a celebrity promotes them” and cited how as far back as 2018, Taylor Swift posted a simple Instagram story urging her fans to register to vote that triggered more than a quarter of a million registrations in less than 72 hours.
So maybe that fake AI Taylor Swift endorsement film Donald Trump reposted wasn’t just a satirical joke after all? Not with polls showing that Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden is mobilising support among predominantly young black and Hispanic voters previously disinclined to bother. Even before the DNC ‘celeb-fest’ in Chicago, polls were showing the Harris/Walz ticket on 48.4% compared to Trump/Vance on 45.3% but with the margins tighter in the critical swing states and the next set of polls will show whether the convention increased Kamala Harris’s momentum or showed signs of a ‘honeymoon period destined not to last’, as Trump campaign strategists predict.
But one thing seems certain and that is the 2024 presidential election could well be decided by the Great Gender Divide with polls showing Trump holding a 14% lead among registered male voters and Harris a 21% one among women. Another reason why both camps are energetically courting celebrity endorsements during the remaining ten weeks of the campaign and investing millions in promoting that high profile support.
The big debate
Meanwhile, strategists on both sides are agreed that the D-Day key to the election result on November 5th could actually be September 10th — the date of the only guaranteed (so far) presidential TV debate pitching Harris’s forensic prosecutorial skills against Trump’s flamboyant, angry man showmanship. Harris will be exercising her ‘hope not hate’ strategy to counter Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan which she’s said to be pondering depicting onstage as a dangerously divisive and cynically self-serving ‘Make America Hate Again’ weapon by a ‘disgraced’ ex-president with autocratic comeback ambitions.
As one independent pollster put it to me: “If either of them lose that debate badly there’s no coming back... the stakes are that high. It’s also why some Trump strategists are genuinely worried that he’s lost his campaign mojo lately and hasn’t yet got his head around the fact he’ll be facing a very smart much younger woman of black and Indian heritage than the doddery Joe Biden figure he was confident he had the measure of. “Between now and September 10th, they’ll be working overtime to try and rehearse him for a very different debate ballgame. Whether his colossal ego can accept the imperative tactical switch is the make-or-break factor and the repercussions will stretch way beyond just here in the US.”
In yet another late twist, Trump threatened to pull out of the agreed September 10th TV debate accusing the long established ABC network of being a “fake news” organisation. The outburst came in the middle of the night on his Truth Social platform. But Republican campaign officials were actively pressing him against carrying out the threat, arguing it would backfire in the court of public opinion.
It was also being seen as a bid by Trump to get an additional debate aired on his favourite, strongly partisan Fox News network owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The initial reaction of a senior Kamala Harris campaign official was that “it sounds like a bluff by a candidate running short of confidence. But Kamala will turn up on September 10th whether Trump’s there or not.”
Either way, the worlds of media and global politics will watch and wait with a curious combination of fascination and trepidation.
