Could there really be something new under the sun in U.S. politics? “Celebrities are America’s new politicians,” proclaimed an Axios headline published this week. The piece explained:
Launching gubernatorial bids, making presidential endorsements, founding schools: Celebrities are getting increasingly involved in U.S. public and political life …
As we’ve reported, politics is no longer just the purview of career politicians, as companies and their CEOs throw their weight around to affect policies. Now, movie stars, famous musicians and professional athletes also are using their influence in politics.
It has often been asserted that Donald Trump’s election as president abolished all prerequisites for high-level political candidacy. But are we really starting to see the results of that “paradigm shift,” as Axios suggests? Some of the examples offered fade a bit under scrutiny. Yes, Caitlyn Jenner ran in the recent California gubernatorial recall contest. She also finished in 13th place with one percent of the vote, and even that is inflated since a big chunk of voters skipped the replacement contest entirely.
There is a rich history of celebrities running for office — and winning — long before Trump, but apparently they’re not much of a factor in this current trend. Axios brings up Ronald Reagan only to dismiss him as irrelevant because he had served in lower office before becoming president (though I’d say getting elected governor of California without any prior government service was pretty significant). Arnold Schwarzenegger is cited as a cautionary tale for celebrities with no political experience, as he was widely criticized while serving as governor of California (though he managed to get himself reelected by a landslide). If it’s remarkable that Matthew McConaughey might run for governor of Texas in 2022, perhaps it’s even more notable that ex-wrestler Jesse “the Body” Ventura actually did get elected governor of Minnesota in 1998, a decade before the same state elected TV star and comedian Al Franken to the U.S. Senate?
Stars trying to influence politics without entering the arena themselves strikes me as even more underwhelming. Maybe that’s because I’m old enough to remember much earlier generations of celebrity support for politicians, including the Rat Pack’s famous affinity for Richard Nixon and the host of entertainment and athletic figures associated with the Kennedys. The celebrity factor was kind of hard to miss when former football great Roosevelt Greer, Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, and authors George Plimpton, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill wrestled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground after he shot RFK, then singer and TV star Andy Williams made a huge stir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at Bobby’s funeral.
But the star-turned-politician trend well predates the 1960s. One could even argue it’s among the oldest trends in U.S. politics, if you consider George Washington and the nine fellow generals who succeeded him in the presidency “celebrities.” Here are just some of the figures who earned fame in other walks of life and then converted it into political capital long before Trump traded reality-show sets for the Oval Office.
Actors in politics
Reagan and Schwarzenegger actually had plenty of predecessors in California politics who were first actors. In 1964, Tinseltown star George Murphy was elected to a U.S. Senate seat from the Golden State (he held it for one term before losing to John Tunney, the son of famous boxer Gene Tunney, who in turn lost to S.I. Hayakawa, who was a mere college administrator when he became a celebrity by harshly suppressing a student strike).
In the 1940s, Broadway and Hollywood actress Helen Gahagan Douglas was elected to Congress from California and was the 1950 Democratic nominee facing Richard Nixon in what became one of the most famous (and vicious) U.S. Senate races ever. Douglas, in fact, pioneered the apt sobriquet “Tricky Dick” for the future president. She also allegedly had a long-standing affair with Lyndon B. Johnson, though it’s possible that was just celebrity gossip.
And Shirley Temple, perhaps the most famous child actor of all time, entered politics as an adult. As Shirley Temple Black, she ran for Congress in California in 1967 and later held multiple diplomatic positions.
Outside California, Hollywood actor John Davis Lodge was elected to Congress from Connecticut in 1946, then elected governor in 1950; he was later U.S. ambassador to Spain. TV actor Fred Grandy served four terms as a congressman from Iowa. And while he began his career as a Senate staffer and lobbyist, Fred Thompson was much better known as an actor when he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Tennessee in 1994.
Musicians in politics
Jimmie Davis, a country and gospel singer best known for “You Are My Sunshine,” was first elected governor of Louisiana in 1944 and then returned to the office in 1960 as a reactionary opponent of civil rights.
Next door in Texas, another legendary reactionary, W. Lee (“Pass the Biscuits, Pappy”) O’Daniel, was elected governor in 1939 and a U.S. senator in 1941 (beating LBJ in that contest) after becoming famous as a country-music bandleader and radio huckster for the Hillbilly Flour Company.
And going back to California, Sonny Bono (of Sonny & Cher fame) was elected to two terms in Congress before being killed in a skiing accident.
Journalists and writers in politics
One of the more interesting contemporary examples of a celebrity leaping into electoral politics is the likely candidacy of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for governor of Oregon next year. But he isn’t the first celebrity journalist or author to run for high office. If the Douglas-Nixon contest was the nastiest in California history, certainly the second nastiest was the 1934 gubernatorial race between muckraking author and journalist Upton Sinclair (a longtime Socialist running as a Democrat) and Republican pol Frank Merriam. The latter won after huge negative attacks on Sinclair as an un-American who was financed and produced by Hollywood studios and the Hearst newspapers.
It’s notable that Merriam himself began his career as a newspaper publisher. So too, obviously, did Hearst company founder William Randolph Hearst (the model for Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane), a powerful figure in California and national politics for decades and, for a while, a serious aspirant for the presidency (especially in 1904). And one less-than-distinguished U.S. president, Warren G. Harding, was also a local newspaper editor and publisher before formally entering politics.
President Theodore Roosevelt was a published author of a book of military history before he entered politics and government, though he was probably not rightly a “celebrity” that early. One of the oddest and briefest political careers was conducted by the controversial novelist and playwright Gore Vidal, who ran a serious campaign for Congress in New York in 1960 and then a quixotic race against Jerry Brown for the California Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 1982. Vidal later played a U.S. senator in the political satire film Bob Roberts.
Athletes in politics
Caitlyn Jenner is hardly the first celebrity ex-athlete to go into politics. She is, in fact, not even the first Republican Olympic gold-medal decathlete to go into California politics. Bob Matthias, who won the gold in the Decathlon twice (1948 and 1952), later served four terms in Congress representing the northern San Joaquin Valley.
Other Olympians who served in Congress include Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado (judo) and representatives Ralph Metcalfe of Illinois and Jim Ryun of Kansas (both track).
Baseball great Jim Bunning served one term in the U.S. Senate representing Kentucky. Football was represented by Hall of Fame coach Tom Osborne (a congressman from Nebraska), NFL wide receiver Steve Largent (a congressman from Oklahoma), and NFL quarterback Jack Kemp (a congressman from New York, a presidential candidate, and the Republican VP nominee in 1996). The most famous basketballer in politics was Bill Bradley, the Princeton and NBA star who served three terms in the U.S. Senate and ran for president in 2000.
Other celebrities in politics
The above categories don’t at all cover the various ways people become famous and then get into politics. John C. Frémont was a famed explorer. Herbert Hoover (known as the Great Humanitarian) won global fame as a food-relief organizer during and after World War I before he entered government service. And in our own era, a significant number of civil-rights-movement veterans have made their way into electoral politics (led by the late John Lewis).
The bottom line is there’s no real evidence that we’re entering some sort of golden age of celebrities going into politics, or even that Trump changed everything. He may be the least-accomplished celebrity ever to win high office, but he wasn’t the first and will hardly be the last.
The 2024 federal budget failed to spark a much-needed rebound in the polls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trailing Liberal party, according to new Ipsos polling released Tuesday.
Canadian reaction to the Liberal government’s latest spending plans shows an historic challenge ahead of the governing party as it tries to keep the reins of government out of the Conservative party’s hands in the next election, according to one pollster.
“If the purpose of the budget was to get a political reboot going, it didn’t seem to happen,” says Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs.
The 2024 federal budget tabled last week included billions of dollars in new spending aimed at improving “generational fairness” and rapidly filling in Canada’s housing supply gap.
Ipsos polling conducted exclusively for Global News shows voters’ reactions to the 2024 federal budget mostly ranged from lacklustre to largely negative.
After stripping out those who said they “don’t know” how they feel about the federal budget (28 per cent), only 17 per cent of Canadians surveyed about the spending plan in the two days after its release said they’d give it “two thumbs up.” Some 40 per cent, meanwhile, said they’d give it “two thumbs down” and the remainder (43 per cent) gave a symbolic “shrug” to Budget 2024.
“Thumbs down” reactions rose to 63 per cent among Alberta respondents and 55 per cent among those in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Some 10 per cent of respondents said the budget would personally help them, while 37 per cent said it would hurt, after again stripping out those who said they didn’t know what the impact would be.
Asked about how they’d vote if a federal election were held today, 43 per cent of respondents said they’d pick the Conservatives, while 24 per cent said they’d vote Liberal, followed by 19 per cent who’d lean NDP.
The Conservative lead is up one point from a month earlier, Bricker notes, suggesting that Budget 2024 failed to stem the bleeding for the incumbent Liberals.
Only eight per cent of respondents to the Ipsos poll said the budget made them more likely to vote Liberal in the upcoming election, while roughly a third (34 per cent) said it made them less likely.
“The initial impressions of Canadians are that it hasn’t made much of a difference,” Bricker says.
Sentiment towards the Liberals remains slightly higher among generation Z and millennial voters — the demographics who appeared to be the focus of Budget 2024 — but Bricker says opinions remain “overwhelmingly negative” across generational lines.
Heading into the 2024 budget, the Liberals were under pressure to improve affordability in Canada amid a rising cost of living and an inaccessible housing market, Ipsos polling conducted last month showed.
The spending plan included items to remove junk fees from banking services and concert tickets, as well as some items aimed at making it easier for first-time homebuyers to break into the housing market. It also included a proposed change to how some capital gains are taxed, which the Liberals have claimed would target the wealthiest Canadians.
Paul Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze, told Global News after the federal budget’s release that while he was encouraged by acknowledgements about the economic unfairness facing younger demographics, there is no quick fix for the affordability crisis in the housing market.
Trudeau, his cabinet ministers and Liberal MPs have hit the road both before and after the budget’s release to promote line items in the spending plan.
Bricker says this is the typical post-budget playbook, but so far it looks like there’s nothing that “really caught on with Canadians” in the early days after the release of the spending plans. The Liberals have a chance to make something happen on the road, he says, but it’s “not looking great.”
“Maybe over the course of the next year, they’ll be able to demonstrate that they’ve actually changed something,” he says.
Bricker notes, however, that public opinion has changed little in federal politics over the past year.
The next federal election is set for October 2025 at the latest, but could be called earlier if the Liberals fail a confidence vote or bring down the government themselves.
But a vote today would see the Liberals likely lose to a “very, very large majority from the Conservative party,” Bricker says.
“What we’re seeing is, if things continue on as they’ve been continuing for the space of the last year, that they will end up in a situation where, almost an historic low in terms of the number of seats,” he says.
The Conservatives are leading in every region in the country, except for Quebec, where the Bloc Quebecois holds the pole position, according to the Ipsos polling.
The Liberals are meanwhile facing “a solid wall of public disapproval,” Bricker says. Some 32 per cent of voters said they would never consider voting Liberal in the next election, higher than the 27 per cent who said the same about the Conservatives, according to Ipsos.
Typically, Bricker says an incumbent party can hold onto a lead in some demographic, age group or region and build out a strategy for re-election from there.
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But this Liberal party lacks any foothold in the electorate, making prospects look grim in the next federal election; it’s so bleak that he even invokes the Progressive Conservative party’s historic rout in the 1993 vote.
“The hill they have to climb is incredibly hard,” Bricker says.
“I haven’t seen a hill this high to climb in federal politics since Brian Mulroney was faced with a very similar situation back in 1991 and ’92. And we all know what happened with that.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between 17 and 18, April 2024, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18-plus was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18-plus been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
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The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
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“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
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West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
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By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
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LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
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Fareed’s take: There’s been an unprecedented wave of migration to the West
On GPS with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he shares his take on how the 2024 election will be defined by abortion and immigration.
Honda to build electric vehicles and battery plant in Ontario, sources say – Global News
See how chicken farmers are trying to stop the spread of bird flu – Fox 46 Charlotte
Simcoe-Muskoka health unit urges residents to get immunized
Own a cottage or investment property? Here's how to navigate the new capital gains tax changes – The Globe and Mail
Osoyoos commuters invited to celebrate Earth Day with the Leg Day challenge – Oliver/Osoyoos News – Castanet.net
Freeland defends budget measures, as premiers push back on federal involvement – CBC News
‘A real letdown’: Disabled B.C. man reacts to federal disability benefit – Global News
Haberman on why David Pecker testifying is ‘fundamentally different’ – CNN
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