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Kamala Harris held her last rally of the presidential campaign season on the night before Election Day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tens of thousands of people lined up for the free concert that featured Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Fat Joe, Jazmine Sullivan, and the Roots. The vice president seemed almost tangential to the spectacle: It was pushing midnight before Oprah introduced Harris to make her final case to voters.

Did a truncated campaign season persuade Harris-Walz handlers that glitzy unelecteds from the rarified galaxies of Hollywood and the music industry were the fastest and best way to amplify Harris-Walz messaging? It seemed that Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Megan Thee Stallion, Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Cardi B, Katy Perry, Julia Roberts, Eminem, Robert De Niro, Spike Lee, and Leonardo DiCaprio were everywhere all at once—pumping up crowds at rallies in battleground states or tapping out their versions of joy online.

That star power blinded the Harris-Walz campaign to a powerful miscalculation, one that stalked them all summer and into the fall as they zeroed in on the brightest lights: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny. Together, they seemed to constitute a holy grail of good gets. Securing their endorsements, so the thinking appeared to go, would motivate the most sought-after groups in the Democratic base—women, African Americans, and Latinos—and deliver their votes, and the elusive youth vote most of all, to Harris. One by one, the trio signed on: Swift in September, Beyoncé and Bad Bunny in October—days before the election that Harris lost.

In an era of economic hardship and political acrimony, it’s past time for the Democratic Party to recalibrate its relationships with its own millionaire and billionaire celebrities. Beautiful people and free concerts are nice diversions, but they don’t persuade specific groups of voters to cast a ballot for a presidential candidate. That doesn’t mean those candidates, often fangirls and -boys themselves, will ever swear off celebrity endorsements and the accompanying media attention and dollars they generate. But celebrities have to be deployed in ways that can serve specific goals with tangible outcomes.

“Hope, joy, and hard work missed the mark for the majority of Americans,” says Susan Smocer Platt, Joe Biden’s onetime Senate chief of staff, whose memoir, Love, Politics, and Other Scary Things, looks back on her and her late husband’s Capitol Hill careers. Polls and vote totals make clear that the celebrity endorsements and appearances did not have the results the Harris team anticipated, Platt says. “It got people’s attention for a minute, but it wasn’t enough to get them out, because they weren’t ultimately feeling it, either because of economic insecurity, health reasons, or they have a chip on their shoulder.”

Not even Beyoncé can persuade African Americans disgusted with politics to vote if they are convinced the system has nothing to offer them.

Beyoncé’s proclamation— “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother”—at Harris’s Houston rally in late October rang hollow. Harris needed to break through the country’s political white noise to sideline Donald Trump and hobble his disinformation network. Her campaign decided that the beautiful ones fit the bill. They were certainly prettier than Donald Trump’s nontraditional lineup dominated by macho men and tech gurus.

But the star power on display in these campaign-trail songfests undermined the Democrats by giving the Republicans flesh-and-blood examples of what they considered to be Democratic bicoastal elitism. Not even Beyoncé can persuade African Americans disgusted with politics to vote. A slight majority of white women ended up rallying to the MAGA banner again, Taylor Swift notwithstanding. Harris’s California baggage included an entertainment attorney husband who, along with the California fundraising sources that Democrats tap into, only underlined her ties to Hollywood. Joy also proved to be a harder sell for a woman who moved up her state’s political ladder by putting people behind bars.

Donald Trump, the personification of American anger, picked celebrities and influencers like Hulk Hogan, Joe Rogan, and Amber Rose, who could speak to and harness the anger he stoked over high prices, undocumented immigrants, health care costs, red tape, and, perhaps above all, the economic and cultural subordination of blue-collar men.

“Although they are equally as wealthy as many of the celebrities that were endorsing her, they really spoke to the working-class demographics that he was targeting,” says Melvin Williams, an associate professor of communication and media studies at Pace University. “He was really leaning into this emergent population of younger white men and younger men in general, who were very much into bro culture and in alignment with Donald Trump’s natural brand.”

AMERICANS HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF POLITICS and celebrities weighing in on political issues. An early-December Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll saw pluralities of Democrats and independents frowning on professional athletes and celebrities speaking out on politics. Republicans don’t want to hear from them either. Most respondents weren’t particularly enchanted with corporations weighing in, either. Although there wasn’t “a huge spike” in celebrities participating, says Ashley Spillane, president of the social impact consulting firm Impactual, there was more media attention than usual on those that did.

For a time, some of the “soft news” media and social media were suggesting that Taylor Swift somehow held the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for both the Trump and Harris camps. After Swift announced for Harris last September—“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make”—she urged her Instagram followers to register to vote, and several hundred thousand people then visited the vote.gov site, which directs users to individual state voter registration sites. But it’s virtually impossible to know yet whether those fans followed up to register—or cast a ballot, or voted for Harris.

Despite Swift’s overtures for Harris, youth turnout was abysmal. Overall, young women did vote for Harris, but also overall, white women broke for Trump. Again. “Gen Z was going to save us, right?” says E. Michele Ramsey, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State University-Berks, where she teaches a “Taylor Swift, Gender, and Communication” course. “I’m wondering if the Democrats didn’t account for how her social media presence has changed, and what that has meant in terms of impact. There’s not that authenticity in her Instagrams anymore. It’s product. It’s selling. And one of the things we know from research is, if you just use your social media to sell things, you lose authenticity points.”

One Gen Z Harris canvasser, Chris Tuck, appreciated the vice president’s attempts to capture fans’ attention. But young people, he told me during October door-knocking in Philadelphia, could see through the ploy. “Genuine approaches” to voters, and keeping art and music out of politics, would matter more. “Keeping that separate is important; it’s two different worlds,” he said. “It’s just not realistic.”

To persuade and register impact, a celebrity must be authentic, likable, and relatable—characteristics that are more important than the numbers of followers they have or the concerts they headline. A celebrity’s power of persuasion and impact increases, Platt believes, if they champion a cause or an issue that lines up with a candidate’s vision and the mood of the country.

Swift actually may have had more influence on older millennials who’ve followed her career from the beginning than on younger fans who knew her post-2009 and who couldn’t or didn’t vote in 2024. Ramsey surmises that many fans’ attitudes toward the superstar may have changed after her dustup with Kanye West at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (where West sparked a long-running feud after interrupting Swift’s Best Female Video acceptance speech to make the case for Beyoncé). Prior to the event, fans appreciated Taylor’s saying stupid things about herself, and other demonstrations of “kind of like us” authenticity. After the incident, she retreated from social media.

The singer wasn’t strongly identified with any one issue that Harris championed, instead using her clout to stress the power of voting. Others, including Trevor Noah and Billie Eilish, branched into specific areas they’d identified, like working at the polls. In the case of Noah, he has the advantage, as a comedian, of being able to break down his reasoning in an engaging, accessible way so that voters might listen to what he has to offer even if they don’t like what he’s selling.

“It’s impossible to measure the impact any single social media post or single rally appearance or podcast recording made on an individual voter’s choice,” says Spillane, who analyzed celebrity engagement and civic participation for a Harvard Kennedy School/Ash Center policy brief. “The question that should be asked is did these prominent figures engage more Americans in our democracy and what is the place we see that they have the biggest impact?”

Effective impact goes beyond having surrogates roll up, sing a few songs, hug the candidate, and move on. Rather than assuming that an appearance or a thought bubble from an actor or a singer will persuade a person to vote, presidential campaigns need to focus on kinetic strategies that demystify election processes for young people, older adults, people of color, and new immigrants, be it through voter registration appeals, tech and language assistance, election information distribution, or working at the polls.

“Influential voices, brands and cultural leaders, celebrities have the ability to make civic engagement more accessible to a lot of people who may not otherwise participate in our democracy,” says Spillane. But that requires more than a song or a joke.

As the flashiness of the celebrity in question increases, however, direct public appeals can have negative blowback too. “We have witnessed an overwhelming number of voters walk away and just simply say, this doesn’t have much relevance to me. I care about how things are going to be improved in my individual household and in my community; these people are already rich,” says Williams.

As long as the American political system runs on privately generated dollars, fundraising remains an essential service that celebrities render and candidates can’t do without. A celebrity willing to have their name appear on an invitation designed to attract a small number of well-heeled people who can write large checks and enjoy rubbing elbows with the headliner and similarly minded contributors is a valuable campaign asset.

Perhaps the next Democratic presidential candidate could take a page out of the late President Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign playbook. Carter understood the fundraising value of celebrities and the importance of a “genuine approach.” He had an authentic relationship with a group of Macon, Georgia, musicians: the Allman Brothers Band, who did benefit concerts for him. Carter knew that nobody wanted to hear his agenda. The concerts were part of his fundraising strategy—a portion of every concert ticket went to his campaign. At the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island, he spoke to the audience before the band went on to make a few points: that he was running for president, that he would win, and that he wanted their votes. Then he introduced the band and left the stage to cheers.

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