Politicians may pine for support from Taylor Swift, but celebrity endorsements can be a mixed bag

This Sunday, millions of Americans will watch the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers face off in the Super Bowl. They might also notice a certain pop star in the audience, cheering for her boyfriend on the field.

And the world will keep turning. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will not be revealed as a fake couple devised to pump up football’s television ratings, promote COVID-19 vaccines, or reelect Joe Biden. Swift will not be exposed as an agent of the Pentagon. And she will not endorse Biden in a postgame ceremony.

All of these rumors have been percolating through the Republican blogosphere, where conspiracy routinely displaces reality. But they also reflect an assumption held by both parties: celebrities help win elections. No one in the GOP would have invented these crazy plots unless they also believed Swift could bring voters to Biden’s column. And Democrats wouldn’t be pining for Swift’s endorsement if they didn’t think she could help put him over the top.

They’re probably both wrong. History suggests we have radically overestimated celebrities’ influence — at least at the ballot box. Indeed, political scholar Timothy Stanley has shown that a celebrity endorsement can harm candidates as easily as it can bolster them.

Just ask George McGovern. His 1972 Democratic primary campaign staged the first modern pop concert for a presidential candidate, featuring performances from Barbra Streisand and Carole King, and appearances from Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, and dozens of other Hollywood glitterati. They sold out the 17,000-set Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles and raised over $300,000, an astonishing sum at the time.

And guess what? Most of those fans came to see the celebrities, not the decidedly uncool senator from South Dakota. McGovern was eclipsed by the stars, who in turn provoked a backlash among conservative voters. He was tagged as the darling of the “Hollywood elite,” which was the kiss of death.

It didn’t help that some of those same celebrities had developed political crushes on communist dictators. Other VIPs at the Forum concert included Jane Fonda — who had gone to Hanoi to praise America’s enemies — and Shirley MacLaine, who went to Maoist China and reported that “everything is possible” there.

McGovern won the primary and went on to face Richard Nixon, who happily mocked his opponent’s radical-chic Hollywood allies. Nixon lined up his own entertainment endorsers — including Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., who had both campaigned for John F. Kennedy in 1960 — but they tended to be older, more established figures.

Nixon’s favorite actor was the cowboy icon John Wayne, who returned the favor by voicing advertisements for Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972. That helped cement Nixon’s Middle America and tough-guy image, as his adviser Kevin Phillips explained. “John Wayne might sound bad to people in New York, but he sounds great to the schmucks down there along the Yahoo Belt,” Phillips said.

But even Wayne turned against Nixon in the end. When the scandal over the Watergate break-in hit the news, Wayne called it a “frame-up” by “those bastards” in the press. But after tapes showed that Nixon had conspired to cover it up, the Duke changed his tune. “Damn, he lied to me!” Wayne exclaimed.

That’s another problem with celebrities: You never know what they’ll say, or how they might embarrass you. Remember Clint Eastwood’s speech on behalf of Mitt Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention? The Romney campaign was so starstruck that it didn’t give the actor any instructions beforehand. So everyone was surprised — and mortified — when Eastwood spent several minutes addressing an empty chair, which he pretended was Barack Obama.

Obama is often cited as the president who gained the most from celebrity firepower. One study calculated that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Obama in 2008 generated an extra million votes for him. And when he ran for reelection against Romney in 2012, Hollywood went gaga for Obama. By one estimate, he raised 16 times more money from the entertainment community than Romney did.

But let’s face it: Obama was one of a kind. He had so much star power of his own that he probably didn’t need the boost from Lena Dunham, John Legend, and the hordes of other celebrities who fawned over him. Riffing on the 2012 blockbuster film The Dark Knight Rises, Obama’s campaign even released a photo of him and his vice president posing as “the Dynamic Duo” of Batman and Robin.

Obama’s vice president, of course, was Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine how the octogenarian Biden could ever become cool, even with an endorsement from Taylor Swift. Nor is it clear that Swift’s support would help Biden any more than it did Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, whom she endorsed in 2018. Republican media pilloried Swift, Donald Trump announced that he liked her music “about 25% less,” and Bredesen was defeated by the MAGA stalwart Marsha Blackburn.

“A big shout out to Taylor Swift for speaking out,” Hollywood director Rob Reiner tweeted in 2018 after she endorsed Bredesen. “You can single handedly change this country.” Actually, she can’t. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the problem is not with our celebrity stars. It’s with you and me, and with our childlike hope that they will save us.