James Talarico is decidedly not running for Senate in California. But Ken Paxton wants you to think he is.
“California already has two senators. If elected, James Talarico would be California’s third senator,” Talarico’s opponent for Texas’ open Senate seat recently told Newsweek.
The attack comes as Hollywood donors line up behind the 37-year-old Democratic populist. Peter Chernin and Damon Lindelof have hosted fundraisers for Talarico; Robert De Niro headlined a New York fundraiser; and Brad Garrett, Holland Taylor and Noah Wyle have all kicked in dollars to help Texas elect a Democratic senator for the first time since 1988.
Support from some of America’s best-known entertainers might seem like an asset. But this election season, Hollywood is a gun Republicans are trying to turn against their opponents.
As the midterms come into the heated homestretch ahead of Election Day on Nov. 3, Republicans have found what they hope is a potent new avenue, especially in the South and Midwest: knock a candidate’s celebrity connections. They hope it can stop what many polls say will be a blue wave, even as it’s unclear that voters in a time of costs and crisis care which sitcom star might vote for you.
Running against “the media” has been a time-tested strategy to get GOP candidates elected, no matter that Fox News is the most watched cable channel in the country. But after a 2024 election season when the support of Beyoncé, Eminem and Taylor Swift didn’t help Kamala Harris and in some swing states may have hurt her, GOP strategists and pundits nationwide are doubling down on a newer anti-celebrity gambit. The party of Ronald Reagan and Sonny Bono and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fred Thompson and Clint Eastwood now apparently thinks being silver-screen famous is a liability.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, seeking reelection in Georgia, has garnered major Hollywood support. Shonda Rimes co-hosted a fundraiser, and Chuck Lorre, Sally Field, Larry David, Annette Bening and Ben Stiller all ponied up cash (Bryan Lourd, David Kramer, David Geffen and Casey Bloys, too). This has prompted opponent Mike Collins and his team to sniff how Ossoff is more interested in Hollywood, California, than Hollywood, Georgia (a tiny unincorporated place in the northeast corner of the state, if you’re curious).
And conservative redoubts like The Washington Free Beacon and Fox & Friends have dragged Ossoff because he spent $900 on a makeup session with Stephanie Ponder, who worked on The Notebook and The Hunger Games. “On the campaign trail, however, Ossoff presents himself less as a polished pretty boy and more as a populist fighter for the working class,” the Beacon sneered in breaking Revlongate, while on Fox & Friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy snarked, “I don’t see that they’re doing anything amazing to his face. I mean, I’ll do it for $900 a pop. I mean, did you see that?” Campos-Duffy, it should be noted, got her start on The Real World: San Francisco.
The anti-Hollywood attacks are perhaps one reason Abdul El-Sayed, the fiercely progressive Democrat vying to win a Senate seat in Michigan, has pointedly stayed away from many entertainment biz associations, though Republicans tried to make hay of a fundraiser with Jeffrey Soros, George’s nephew, as a “movie producer.” (Soros has what might be generously called a thin Hollywood résumé; perhaps his best-known credit is the minor Sundance hit Magazine Dreams.) After the event, the spokesperson for opponent Mike Rogers chose to mainly knock El-Sayed for his “dark Soros money.” Sometimes you just gotta play the hits.
All this Hollywood bashing feels a little odd coming from a party whose leader rode 14 seasons of reality show fame to the White House. Never mind, also, that this midterm cycle, Republicans hope to elect Minnesota’s first GOP senator in more than two decades: former Sunday Night Football sideline reporter Michele Tafoya, who made her name by appearing on the highest-rated show on television for more than 10 years. (Opponent Peggy Flanagan has been seeking to weaponize something else — Tafoya’s comments a few years ago that she’d like to move to Florida and become a “future former Minnesotan.”) The point is that Republicans think Hollywood’s Q rating is so low that bashing a candidate with such associations can help them.
They seem to have missed the memo, though, that Big Tech has largely replaced Hollywood as the glam villain that citizens might actually vote against. In Wisconsin, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany has shrewdly gone after Democratic opponent David Crowley as “Data Center David” for his perceived support of such projects. Polls have the candidates even, so it could be working. Meanwhile, Ossoff remains seven points ahead of Collins despite the supposedly toxic association with Grey’s Anatomy and Young Sheldon.
Middle America Republicans haven’t been entirely unwilling to stay off the celebrity train themselves. Witness Tennessee, where Sen. Marsha Blackburn, in her bid for governor, just reposted an AI video of herself singing and dancing to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” at the 2025 Super Bowl. The veteran Republican actually has voted for deepfake protections and also does not exactly have the strongest civil rights record, having not supported the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or critical race theory in classrooms.
All of that makes a synthetic video for a song about Black disenfranchisement a cringe look, and Dems and even Republicans quickly got to mocking the post, which Blackburn accompanied with the words, “Tomorrow. Ready to roll.” Given some of the bait Republicans are taking, Rickrolled might have been the more apt meme.
This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.