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?
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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.”
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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,........