In her first visit to the rebranded Kamala HQ in Wilmington, Delaware, Kamala Harris walked out to Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” The song is also the soundtrack for Harris’s first campaign video. Her campaign reportedly got permission from Beyoncé to use the song as Harris’s theme music, in what appears to be tacit support for her candidacy and perhaps a preview of some more explicit endorsement to come. Harris already has a great deal of star power at her disposal, for whatever that’s worth. At the opening event for her Atlanta campaign, she had Megan Thee Stallion performing “Body” and Quavo of the Migos talking about gun control. Harris had Charli XCX, a pop star who might’ve otherwise seemed too aloof (and too British) to weigh in on a U.S. presidential election—especially in favor of such an establishment politician—affectionately calling her “brat.”
This week, Harris has got a long list of celebrities glad-handing at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago: John Legend, Kerry Washington, Mindy Kaling, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Billy Porter, Spike Lee, Lil Jon—even USA Basketball gold medalist Steve Kerr stepped onstage to deliver a speech. This sort of star-studded lineup generates excitement in some voters and a measure of trepidation in others. Haven’t we been here before? Didn’t Hillary Clinton also wield this sort of star power eight years ago, in her own showdown with Donald Trump? And didn’t she ultimately seem kind of ridiculous and dysfunctionally out of touch as a result?
A month ago, Joe Biden quit running for reelection and instead urged Democrats to nominate his vice president to face Trump in November. Biden’s late withdrawal sparked an unprecedented post-primary reset in the presidential race, yes, but also a peculiar sort of pop culture breakthrough for Harris and, subsequently, a demonstration of the big divergence in how the two major parties interact with pop culture, especially in election years.
Democrats, as the preferred party of younger voters, have long enjoyed a sort of pop cultural edge over Republicans. But Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, and while he was once, as Barack Obama’s vice president, an ironically endearing caricature of a swaggy grandpa, he’s more recently come to be seen as a distressingly old man who is visibly languishing in office; his relationship with pop culture is relatively weak. Hillary Clinton is only five years younger than Biden; she is a baby boomer who was awkwardly obliged to stump with Lady Gaga and Pusha T. Harris, at 59, is a few years younger than Obama and is the only presidential nominee of the past three cycles who would plausibly recognize Charli XCX. A few weeks ago, Tucker Carlson sarcastically wondered, “How was Kamala Harris transformed from an embarrassing incompetent to the coolest, most inspirational leader in the world in a single day?” Being two decades younger than most others in U.S. political leadership certainly helps.
Harris’s embrace of “brat” isn’t entirely about exciting pop stan bases and turning out the young vote, though. Harris has gushed about Cardi B, but she’s also gushed about Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. She and her running mate, Tim Walz, have bonded over the Minnesota governor’s home-state hero Prince. She isn’t out to prove that she’s youthful so much as cultured: that she’ll be a cool president in the modern tradition of first-term Bill Clinton and Obama, that she’s a fashionable standard-bearer for the party of college-educated voters.
This sort of middlebrow branding has been a double-edged sword for Democrats in recent years. Obama curiously positioned himself as a sort of arts-and-leisure president. He soft launched Hamilton at a poetry jam in the East Room of the White House six years before the musical hit Broadway. He befriended Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen. He became the first sitting president to appear on a late-night talk show. In his post-presidency, he’s become a streaming media mogul and dutiful blogger of year-end lists. Hillary Clinton tried, in her awkwardly dated way, to inherit her predecessor’s cultural clout. Her multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote rallies drew comparisons to awards shows and music festivals, given the celebrity lineups for these things. Clinton employed Katy Perry for a GOTV concert in Philadelphia before going on to become the first Democrat to lose Pennsylvania since 1988. Given the magnitude of her failure, Clinton, to many observers, became the perfect representation of Democrats’ overinvestment in celebrity worship and according failure to develop an effective response to the emergent populism of the 2010s. Of course, the Republicans’ nomination of Trump was its own perverse sort of celebrity worship. It’s hard to say who seems more foolish in the current cycle: the Democrats clamoring for Taylor Swift to endorse Harris, as if that would sway the election in some miraculous way, or the Republicans—including Trump himself, apparently—who seem genuinely fearful, or at least a little insecure, about the singer’s favor and potential impact.
Amid the predictable backlash to Megan Thee Stallion’s new “Hotties for Harris” anthem, the right-wing commentator Matt Walsh tweeted, “Please do not try to counter this by parading around a bunch of washed up or obscure entertainers that nobody cares about. That just makes us look sad and irrelevant.” This is the recurring conundrum for Republicans. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump trotted out Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Savannah Chrisley, and … Amber Rose? Elsewhere, Trump has employed Sheff G and Lil Pump, with evident uncertainty about who these people even are. In fairness: What are his alternatives? Celine Dion recently chastised the Trump campaign for playing “My Heart Will Go On” to warm up a crowd in Bozeman, Montana. She’s one of dozens of popular musicians—Eminem, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Rihanna, Adele, Pharrell, R.E.M., the list goes on—who have in recent years implored Trump and other Republican candidates to stop playing their songs at official events. Democrats don’t really have this problem; Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, in one rare instance, asked Obama to stop playing “Hold On I’m Coming” at his campaign rallies in 2008. Meanwhile, for three consecutive cycles now, Trump’s go-to rally song has been the Village People’s gay cruising anthem, “Y.M.C.A.,” despite persistent objections from the lead singer, Victor Willis.
This divergence in cultural clout has been historically driven by a weird mix of personal quirks and broader trends in partisan politics. John F. Kennedy was the first president of the television era, and a perfect specimen as such—he was a young and glamorous figure who associated with the most famous entertainers of his generation. But JFK’s generation was Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly—guys who were born in the 1910s and who would’ve served in World War II—not the rock stars or jazz virtuosos of the early ’60s; Jackie Kennedy, who in 1961 created the office of the White House curator, talked about presenting “the best in the arts … not necessarily what was popular at the time.” So Democrats didn’t exactly have a monopoly on popular entertainment in the ’60s, but the Kennedy White House, in a sense, set the stage for more fashionable figureheads. JFK’s old rival, Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was very uptight and somewhat old-fashioned and thus decidedly out of sync with popular culture in the 1970s. (Though some theorize that his 1968 Laugh-In cameo, in which he famously uttered, “Sock it to me,” may have helped him win that year’s election.) Ronald Reagan, as a former screen actor, was certainly savvier than Nixon, but Reagan was also conspicuously aligned with Christian fundamentalists who took a dim view of Hollywood. Bill Clinton—a young, Southern Democratic governor deeply influenced by Kennedy—was cultured. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He played saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. His political opponents were men as jowly and dour as Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. Obama ran against John McCain and Mitt Romney—again, figures who were far less modern (for better or worse, whatever you make of modernity) than their Democratic adversary. The partisan contrast was entrenched at this point.
Historically, Republicans have spun their alienation from Hollywood as proof of their proximity to Real America. In recent years, Trump has tried to reboot his party’s relation to mainstream entertainment and modern celebrity on his own terms. He’s burnished his association with professional wrestling and MMA and boxing, with a certain shrewdness about the implicit contrast: If liberals must dominate the supposedly frivolous realm of artists, then Trump is determined to affiliate the MAGA movement with the more rugged and individualistic underworld of contact sports. Trump has also sporadically pandered to hip-hop, most notoriously via Kanye West, and most recently with the implication that Trump’s indictments and convictions give him some sort of street cred. These appeals have been largely unsuccessful—the pro-Trump rap pantheon is a heap of novelty rappers covered in MAGA kitsch.
Of course, Donald Trump was once a celebrity entertainer in his own right: an aspirational name-check in countless raps, a yapping creature of tabloid TV. He likely never would’ve become the national spokesman for “birtherism” and then the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 if not for his earlier ubiquity via The Apprentice and Home Alone 2. Trump knows the true power of entertainment better than anyone else. Maybe, in his estimation, his party should be taking Taylor Swift as seriously as his opposition obviously—and at times quite annoyingly—does. Harris, on the other hand, must craft a pop cultural appeal that emphasizes strengths—her youth, her joy—without branding Democrats as the party of pop trivia, stan armies, and coastal extravagance. Don’t deny an endorsement from Swift, obviously, but don’t expect her to save you in Pennsylvania.
