Oprah for President? Why celebrity women haven’t crossed into politics

Before Donald Trump was a president, he was a television celebrity and high-profile real estate mogul. His political experience, or lack thereof, was touted on the campaign trail eight years ago as a fresh presence in Washington.
A few other men have garnered celebrity status before they ventured into politics. Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all tough-guy film stars long before they ran for president, mayor and governor respectively. Al Franken got people laughing on “Saturday Night Live” before serving as a Minnesota senator.
But no woman has transitioned from stardom to high public office.
To better understand why and which famous female might be able to make the shift, Suffolk University and USA TODAY conducted an exclusive poll earlier this month of 1,000 likely voters.
Three celebrity women would win the backing of nearly 30% of those polled: TV personality Oprah Winfrey, actor Sandra Bullock and 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams. Actresses Viola Davis and Julia Roberts and comedian Tina Fey each earned the support of about a quarter of those surveyed, with Whoopi Goldberg, Jodie Foster and Rachel Maddow not too far behind.
But other high-profile women didn’t win a lot of support and for many, running for office would be a turnoff. Roughly three-quarters of those polled said they’d be less likely to support Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, or Jennifer Lopez if they made a bid for public office.
Even more were against a run by Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian and Caitlyn Jenner.
(The poll included 1,000 likely voters, but the list of 22 well-known women was split into two groups, with 500 people asked about 11 women each to make the list more manageable.)
More than a quarter of respondents had no answer as to why this might be. Of the rest, the most common explanations for the lack of female candidates were: sexism, that women were too smart to run for office and that not enough women were trying to run.
It’s not surprising amid exhaustion over politics that Americans are looking at celebrities as alternative options for leadership.
But even if a celebrity woman is liked, it’s not clear that she will be perceived as capable of doing the job, said Erin Loos Cutraro, found and CEO of She Should Run, a nonpartisan group that works to increase the number of women running for public office.
So how does that explain the success of Trump, a celebrity who achieved likeability and qualification in voters’ eyes?
“This is the reality of our system, there’s a double standard for women,” Cutraro said. “Men have a perceived and built-in assumption of qualification. If they can crack likeability, they’re well-positioned.”
Take arguably one of the most influential celebrity women of the era, Taylor Swift. Respondents weren’t completely aligned on whether they would support the “Tortured Poet” star in a run for office, with 73% saying they were less likely to support her if she ran for office.
Women poll participants were more likely than men to support the pop star, while 28% of Democrats and only 4% of Republicans said they would likely support Swift on a ticket.
Someone like Swift may be able to make a bigger difference by spotlighting a specific issue or encouraging people to vote than by running for office themselves, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
More than 30,000 people registered to vote after Swift encouraged them to in a single Instagram post, for instance. (Male celeb Matthew McConaughey stirred rumors of public leadership following the publication of a 2020 bestselling memoir and his public activism on gun violence.)
“They have a megaphone that your average person simply doesn’t,” Walsh said. “All of them have the capacity to use their voice to get people to be more engaged.”
But recent history has raised questions over whether an apolitical person in a political role is the ticket voters seek.
Even mayors, like Michael Bloomberg in New York City, and business leaders like Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, had short-lived runs for president, with their celebrity shaping their campaign’s early notoriety.
“Donald Trump is clearly the exception to that rule,” Walsh said. “He is an outlier when it comes to how you become president of the United States … It would be interesting to see if anyone else follows that.”
The value of female candidates is the differences they bring and advocate for, said Cutraro.
And it’s not as simple as saying this trait versus another guarantees success for women in politics, she said. When women do run, they win at the same rate as men, she said, so it’s a matter of challenging a system that keeps them off the ballot in the first place.
“It is in their different lived experiences,” Cutraro said is the factor that sets female candidates apart. “Black women lead differently. Latina women lead differently. LGBTQ women lead differently.”
Well-known people stir interest in voters, Cutraro said. But no matter someone’s level of celebrity, the goalposts have to shift to guarantee success that women make it onto the ballots. And if a celebrity woman makes it to the top office, it’s not guaranteed to solve issues of gender inequity in the country.
“Women are hit with this reality they can often seem likable or they can seem qualified, it’s challenging for women to be overwhelmingly seen as both,” Cutraro said. “Sometimes in the proving of qualifications they become less likeable.”
Read more:Celebs won’t influence election, poll finds. But one couple still has sway.
It’s not surprising amid exhaustion over politics that Americans are looking at celebrities as alternative options for leadership, but even if a celebrity woman is liked, it’s not clear that she will be perceived as capable of doing the job.
“This is the reality of our system, there’s a double standard for women,” Cutraro said. “Men have a perceived and built-in assumption of qualification. If they can crack likeability, they’re well-positioned.”
There has been at least one woman in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1917 and in the Senate (with a few gap years) since 1921. Only two women ran as major party candidates for vice president ‒ Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, with Walter Mondale, in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin, with John McCain, in 2008 ‒ before Kamala Harris succeeded in winning the post with President Joe Biden in 2020.
Presumptive Republican nominee Trump had promised at one point to choose a woman as his running mate. More recent lists of potential vice presidential candidates have included several men, though his competitor Nikki Haley has been rumored as a potential pairing. Last week, he suggested he would release the name in mid-July at the Republican National Convention.
Haley ran a respectable attempt on the Republican side, Walsh said, crediting her for carefully “threading the needle” on abortion and other hot-button by addressing them directly, rather than avoiding them as many male candidates did.
But in the end, she wasn’t able to breach the threshold “a juggernaut of Donald Trump,” Walsh said. On the Democratic side, a woman might have entered the race, if Biden had decided not to run, she said.
“I don’t think it is a failing of motivation that women aren’t on the national ticket at the top,” Walsh said. “Politics is so much about the circumstance of the moment … It’s not a surprise a woman isn’t vying for the top seat this year.”
Even getting a woman on the top ballot, let alone a celebrity, might not really shift the system.
The inclusion of Harris, the first South Asian, Black and female second-in-command, is an example of the fact that women who challenge barriers are expected to solve all gender inequities, Cutraro said.
“Many people will see that as ‘mission accomplished,'” she said. “There’s one woman, so we’re good to go!”
And there’s the concern that once a woman ‒ celebrity or not ‒ gets to the Oval Office, progress will stall due to a perceived notion that gender equality has somehow been achieved, Cutraro said.
But the work will only get harder then, to make such inclusion sustainable, she said.
And these phenomena aren’t reserved for American politics, citing other democracies that haven’t had many women in high office, either.
“This is a global story,” Cutraro said. “Why is it we are where we are? The answer isn’t simple.”