Politics

Should celebrities and athletes shut up about politics? It’s complicated.

Published

3 months ago

July 4, 2026

Americans are fed up with politics invading every aspect of their lives. But many can’t kick the habit.

Roughly 60 percent of Americans say it feels like politics are everywhere these days where it does not make sense for things to be political, according to new results from The Blue Light News Poll. It’s a rare point of harmony between Republicans and Democrats, with majorities of both parties also agreeing that it is becoming less important what celebrities say about politics.

Unless they agree with them.

The same people who want politics out of everyday life are still influenced when the celebrities’ or athletes’ opinions align with their own. Nearly 70 percent of voters who backed Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would think “more positively” about a movie star if they spoke out against President Donald Trump. The inverse is also true: For nearly 60 percent of the president’s voters, their perception of a star would improve if they expressed support for him.

That picture comes into even sharper relief among the strongest partisans, who are more likely to expect that their favorite celebrities and institutions around them express their political views than those who are more in the middle.

That presents a complicated and often contradictory picture of how voters engage in politics as it bleeds into their daily lives — and the precarious line celebrities and local leaders need to walk as culture and politics become hard to detangle.

Celebrities and athletes have increasingly spoken out about causes like ICE crackdowns and racial equity on the world stage. Key culture podcasts — from the Joe Rogan Experience to Call Her Daddy — have hosted politicians including Trump and Harris. And actors like George Clooney were critical in calling for former President Joe Biden to end his 2024 campaign.

“Everyone should always speak up for what they believe in,” said Jordan C. Brown, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist who has worked with campaigns and celebrities alike. “But there is a cost, and I think I would just caution people of the cost.”

The result is an American public that doesn’t quite know what it wants, one that’s tired of their lives being politicized — but are also influenced by partisan statements.

Voters still care about where celebrities and institutions stand

Majorities of both Harris and Trump voters say politics has invaded spaces where it doesn’t belong, but Trump voters are more concerned than Harris voters are.

For example, most Trump voters (52 percent) say there is too much politics in sports, compared to 31 percent of Harris voters who say the same. In some areas of daily life — like sports, movies and on television, and music — pluralities of Harris voters say there’s an acceptable amount of politics present.

But few Americans say they want more.

Some Americans also claim bringing politics into other realms doesn’t affect them. A plurality of Harris voters — 38 percent — say it doesn’t matter to them if athletes, for example, talk about politics.

And yet, the poll finds, Republicans and Democrats alike actually are swayed by statements from businesses and celebrities.

Strong majorities report that celebrities’, athletes’ or even their local grocery store owners’ political statements impact their views of that individual. And roughly one in five people say they have changed their own opinion on a political topic because a celebrity spoke out about it.

The poll results also reveal a clear pattern for when those statements matter most: Americans respond positively to them when they reflect their own world views.

The majority of 2024 Trump voters say they would view an athlete more positively if they made statements aligned with the president’s agenda, like “We need to crack down on the crime running rampant in our cities.” On the other side, over 60 percent of Harris voters say they would think more positively about athletes who make statements like “We need to tax the richest people in this country.” That’s true even for voters on both sides who said there is “too much” politics in sports.

Hunter Hess, an Olympic freestyle skier, drew heat from President Donald Trump for saying representing the U.S. drew “brings up mixed emotions.”

It’s a familiar phenomenon, according to Shaun Harper, a University of Southern California professor who has researched athletes’ political activism. He described the “‘I don’t want politics in my sports unless they’re my politics’” mindset as “anti-democratic.”

“It is unfair to athletes and to our democracy to expect them to only selectively leverage their platforms and their free speech rights,” he said.

The most politically engaged voters are the ones who care most

The strongest partisans are even more curious about what local, religious and cultural leaders have to say compared with those in the center.

More than one-third of Trump voters who self-identify as “MAGA Republicans”, the president’s most loyal base, say religious institutions should make their views clear to their followers, compared to 22 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters.

MAGA Trump voters are also more likely to act on those political differences: Forty-three percent say they would not buy from a business that made clear it held different political views — compared with 27 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters and roughly 30 percent across all adults.

On the other side of the aisle, about one-third of self-identified “strong” Democrats say athletes should make their political views clear, double the 16 percent of those who say they are “not strong” Democrats who agree.

And 36 percent of “strong” Democrats believe schools and universities should make their political views clear to their students, compared to 22 percent of “not strong” Democrats.

Those who voted third party, or who didn’t vote at all, are even less eager to hear about politics in their regular life: Just 12 percent say celebrities should make their political views clear to their fans. And less than 10 percent said they’ve changed their opinion about a political topic because a celebrity spoke about it.

Celebrities are already less willing to engage with partisan politics

The results shed light on an ongoing debate as stars and campaign strategists try to figure out how — or even if — to engage celebrities with politics.

Finding a way to do so that doesn’t damage their own careers, given the complexity of voters’ and fans’ partisan divides, can be difficult, the poll shows. When some voters claim to want neutrality but secretly want their favorite stars’ politics to match their own, but others demand political engagement, it leaves celebrities to decide which group they can upset the least.

Democrats have used celebrity endorsements and surrogates in significant measure since former President Barack Obama’s star-studded 2008 presidential campaign. Harris, two years ago, saw an outpouring of support for her presidential campaign from a host of VIPs: Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland appeared at her rally in Houston, Taylor Swift posted an endorsement for the former vice president to her millions of social media followers, and Lady Gaga performed at her election-eve rally in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris embraces Beyoncé at a campaign rally in Houston, Texas, on Oct. 25, 2024.

But that backfired for the celebrities when Harris lost, said Todd Hawkins, a Democratic strategist and consultant based in Los Angeles.

“What we saw was the biggest backlash as a result of losing, folks saying celebrities should not tell us what to do, no one cares about what they think,” he said.

Trepidation about the partisan divide is driving many celebrities’ reluctance to get involved in politics in a high-profile way — a dynamic captured by actor Jennifer Lawrence in a 2025 interview with the New York Times, when she was asked about her willingness to speak out against Trump.

“I don’t really know if I should,” she said. “But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart.”

Last year, actor and entrepreneur Selena Gomez posted — and later deleted — a tearful video responding to immigration crackdowns that drew criticism from the right. And Hunter Hess, an Olympic freestyle skier, drew heat from Trump for saying that representing the U.S. in the Games “brings up mixed emotions” after Alex Pretti and Renée Good were shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

“They’re very concerned, they’re scared as hell, but they were scared last year more than anything,” Hawkins said of celebrities. “I still see trepidation on how and what they will do to be engaged.”

The connection between politics and pop culture, however, will hardly dissolve anytime soon, said Brown, the LA-based Democratic strategist: “There’s that phrase: the only thing Hollywood and D.C. love more than themselves are each other.”

Politics

NRSC Chair Tim Scott leaves Georgia, North Carolina off his list of top Senate targets

Published

55 minutes ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is shifting its focus away from the North Carolina and Georgia Senate races as it works to shore up red states like Texas and flip other Democratic-held seats.

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott, the chair of the NRSC, told Senate Republicans that the campaign arm will focus its spending going forward on defending GOP seats in Maine, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Texas and trying to flip the Democratic-held seats of Michigan and New Hampshire, according to four people in the room who were granted anonymity to share private details.

That list notably leaves out North Carolina GOP nominee Michael Whatley’s battle against Democrat Roy Cooper and Georgia GOP nominee Mike Collins’ effort to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Scott’s briefing is the clearest sign yet that Republicans have deprioritized the two states, as POLITICO has reported, while senior Republicans grow increasingly resigned to the possibility of losing those races. It’s a remarkable shift: President Donald Trump carried Georgia twice in 2016 and 2024 and North Carolina over the last three presidential elections.

In deprioritizing North Carolina, the NRSC is effectively ceding a state that Democrats haven’t won in the Senate since 2008.

Still, other GOP groups with massive war chests, including Trump’s MAGA Inc., could pick up the slack.

Scott also shared with the senators polling showing Republicans are locked in tight battles in several other key races, which tracks with much of the public polling, according to the four people.

For example, one poll found that GOP Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio is still trailing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Scott also showed polling indicating Republican John Sununu is essentially neck-and-neck with Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, a seat Republicans are laser-focused on trying to flip.

NRSC did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Collins’ campaign.

“As Roy Cooper said earlier this year about U.S. Senate races in North Carolina, ‘Democrats are often ahead until they are not.’ And then just last week Cooper, correctly, observed, ‘We know a lot of undecided voters lean Republican.’ We’re confident we will have the resources to get our message out to North Carolina voters and win,” said Whatley Spokesman DJ Griffin in a statement.

Georgia GOP party chair Josh McKoon dismissed the notion that his state was being deprioritized by Republicans in Washington, even as he acknowledged beating Ossoff will be a challenge.

“Every cycle, someone in Washington leaks that they’re thinking about moving money,” he said in a text message. “What matters is who shows up — and what the actual numbers say.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is set to headline a fundraiser for Collins in Atlanta on Thursday, alongside the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. The Collins campaign is also making the case that one in 10 Georgia voters — who backed Trump in 2024 and plan to vote for Jackson — are still “up for grabs,” according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.

“The goal in Georgia is to strike a balance where you are spending as little for Senate as possible while not derailing Rick Jackson’s, so far, very strong bid for Governor in a difficult environment,” said a GOP pollster granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape. Public polling shows the governor’s race has much tighter margins, with Jackson leading Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms in some recent surveys.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who lost his Senate primary to Trump-backed Ken Paxton, was also in the room. He later told Blue Light News that the party has to make tough decisions.

“At some point I think the people spending that money are going to have to make hard choices and figure out where the money can have the biggest impact, and certainly Texas is the most expensive,” Cornyn said.

Politics

The NY governor race pollster scrum

Published

1 hour ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A new Quinnipiac University poll has Gov. Kathy Hochul leading her Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman by a sizable margin.

Q THE LANDSLIDE: Quinnipiac University released a poll today that found Gov. Kathy Hochul leading Republican Bruce Blakeman 58-39 — putting her on track for the fourth-largest landslide by a New York gubernatorial candidate in the past 200 years.

It’s by far the best poll for Hochul this year and certainly better than a Siena University survey out this morning that found her with a modest 9 point lead over the Nassau County executive.

So which one’s closer to reality?

The last time both pollsters released New York numbers on the same day was a few weeks before Hochul’s last election in 2022. Siena found at the time that her lead over then-Rep. Lee Zeldin was quickly shrinking, having dropped from 17 to 11 points.

The Q Poll painted a more dire picture for the governor.

“We released a poll in mid-October showing that Hochul had a 4 point lead over Lee Zeldin,” Quinnipiac spokesperson Mary Snow said. “And it went against the grain of other polls out there at the time.”

Hochul wound up winning that race by about 6 points.

Pollster vs. pollster results in prior elections have been mixed. Both Q and Siena nailed Andrew Cuomo’s eventual 23 point margin of victory in October 2018 polls, though Siena’s early November numbers that year found Cuomo’s lead had shrunk to 13. An infamous Q Poll from September 2010 found Cuomo with a stunningly small 6 point lead over Buffalo firebrand Carl Paladino, while a Siena poll the next day found a much more predictive 57-24 Cuomo advantage.

The biggest difference this time around is that Quinnipiac assumed a higher share of November’s turnout will be in deep blue New York City.

The five boroughs accounted for 31 percent of the statewide turnout in 2022 and 34 percent in 2018. Siena’s sample assumed 30 percent of this year’s voters will come from there, while 38 percent of Quinnipiac’s sample was from the city.

Quinnipiac also does more to avoid undecided voters. “One tweak that we made after 2020 was an adjustment to the questions that we ask, so that we try to cut down on the number of people who say they don’t know,” Snow said.

Only 3 percent of the Q Poll’s sample declined to weigh in on the Hochul-Blakeman race, while the comparable number was 9 percent in Siena’s poll. And it appears as if a lot of the Quinnipiac respondents who might not have answered Siena’s questions broke toward the incumbent: Siena has Hochul winning New York City 61-27 while Quinnipiac has her up 70-27; Siena had her up 57-34 among women while Quinnipiac found her lead at 63-34.

Another notable difference between the methodologies that may account for the divergent results is that Quinnipiac’s sample was based on asking respondents what party they affiliate with. Siena uses voter registration files.

“For a couple of years running, the New York Times/Siena Poll was ranked as the most accurate poll in America,” Siena spokesperson Steve Greenberg said. “Siena has been polling New York state for nearly a quarter of a century, and we have shown that we get it right almost all of the time.”

Republicans, for their part, believe both sets of numbers are far overstating Hochul’s advantage.

“Blakeman is closer in the polls I’ve seen than Lee Zeldin was at this moment in time four years ago,” state Senate Republican Campaign Committee Chair George Borrello said. “As I travel around New York state, I have seen literally thousands of Bruce Blakeman signs. Yet I can count on one hand the number of Kathy Hochul signs I’ve seen, unless you count the ones that say ‘Fire Hochul.’” — Bill Mahoney

From the Capitol

A new program has made progress in awarding large-scale batteries and contracting new renewables.

MEGAWATT DEAL: New York has made its first awards for large-scale batteries under a new program and secured contracts for new renewables that are close to getting built.

The state’s energy authority contracted for 719 megawatts from 13 solar, wind and hydroelectric projects and 950 megawatts of battery storage from eight projects.

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen Harris announced the awards Wednesday during a Climate Week event hosted by the state’s renewable developers association.

“Everything that we do with respect to our energy system costs money,” Harris said. “When we invest in clean energy, not only are we talking about low single-digit percentage increases in cost, we are talking about benefits that far exceed those costs.”

Hochul warned that federal headwinds and rising expenses made a more ambitious pace of transitioning to clean energy too costly as she successfully fought to weaken New York’s ambitious climate law earlier this year. But she has highlighted her continued support for progress on offshore wind, renewables, storage and nuclear this week.

New York and developers are racing the expiration of federal tax credits. Renewables that didn’t start construction by July 4 — or don’t finish work by the end of the year if they start after that deadline — won’t be eligible for those key incentives that lower the cost of contracts for the state.

FROM CITY HALL

Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei speaks during a press conference announcing $26.5 million in funding from the City Council.

MAKING ROOM: Bellevue Hospital announced a major renovation and expansion of its inpatient psychiatric wing, fueled by an infusion of $26.5 million from the City Council.

Bellevue, which is part of the NYC Health + Hospitals system, will use the new capital funding to add 40 beds for adult psychiatric patients over the next few years — bringing the division’s total capacity to 204 beds.

Hospital officials said the expansion will ease the bottleneck of patients with severe mental illnesses who need to be admitted for continued observation and treatment; those inpatient psychiatric units have been operating consistently at 98% capacity.

“The need here demanded an investment of this scale,” Council member Virginia Maloney, who spearheaded the funding, said during a news conference in the hospital’s atrium.

Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei said the facility has seen a bump in psychiatric patients since the April 2025 closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel several blocks away. Bellevue’s dedicated ER for psychiatric patients, which Wei said sees about 30 patients daily, is undergoing its own $40 million expansion.

“We are unfortunately needing to transfer out about 90 patients a month to other inpatient units because there’s no room in our inpatient psychiatric units,” Wei said in an interview. “We’re always feeling like I’m toeing the line. We’re very busy.”

Bellevue was so overwhelmed as of late that hospital officials asked FDNY to stop bringing them patients with psychiatric emergencies, according to EMS union Local 2507. Those diversion requests continued for at least a couple weeks in late August and early September, a union spokesperson said. — Maya Kaufman

IN OTHER NEWS

— INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE: A NYC high school which once enrolled 3,000 students now has only 90. (The City Reporter)

— FIRST IN THE NATION: In a new TV ad, Hochul is touting her first-in-the-nation data center moratorium. (City & State)

— HITTING THE BRAKES: The rollout of electric school buses in New York state has been rocky. (The New York Times)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.

Politics

Trump officials weigh rolling back beef import plan as GOP midterm panic spreads

Published

3 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A small group of White House officials are exploring whether to cut back President Donald Trump’s decision to increase foreign beef imports, as GOP panic rises ahead of the midterms.

The proposal to reduce the amount of imports is being discussed within the Domestic Policy Council headed by Vince Haley, a longtime Trump speechwriter and former campaign official, and a few other officials at the White House, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations, who were granted anonymity to share private details.

Trump officials are unsure if anything will come of the talks. The two people said the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative disagrees with cutting back the imports, since it aims to lower high consumer beef prices in the short term and since USTR helped implement the move.

But their conversations about partly rolling back the beef policy — which Trump instituted in August — is a clear sign the White House is trying to stem the alarm from battleground and farm-state Republicans as high prices and Trump’s tariffs roil their election campaigns. The White House is also preparing a plan on diesel exports, likely with exemptions, amid sky-high prices from the Iran war.

The White House, USTR and Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.

Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP Senate nominee, took the extraordinary step this week of publicly breaking with Trump, saying gas prices were too high because of the Iran war and that farmers in her state are suffering. Michigan Senate GOP nominee Mike Rogers and other vulnerable House and Senate Republicans have made similar breaks.

Farm-state lawmakers in Iowa and beyond have publicly called for the White House to provide some relief from the beef import executive action in particular, because of its impact on farmers and ranchers.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the rest of the Iowa delegation and other senior farm-state lawmakers have all pressed the administration to change course — to no avail.

Trump did sign an executive order of rancher-friendly policies as a way to address the initial backlash. But U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer made clear to a group of House Republicans in a closed-door briefing earlier this month that Trump’s executive action to import 300,000 metric tons of beef without certain tariffs and at discounted prices would go forward as planned, as Blue Light News first reported.