What Makes A Celebrity Candidate Successful?
In running for Pennsylvania Senate, syndicated TV talk show doctor Mehmet Oz joins a very small — but historically really successful — fellowship of American politicians: the celebrity amateurs.
Between 1928 and 2018, 166 celebrities have run for public office, according to research published in 2021 in the journal Electoral Studies. Researchers found that when celebrities run, they are most commonly trying to reach the U.S. House of Representatives, and on the whole, they’ve been pretty successful, winning 71 percent of their primary races and 63 percent of general elections.
But while Oz has been the front-runner in his race, celebrity hasn’t been enough to make it an easy sprint. As Nathaniel Rakich reported on Monday, Oz has a lot of well-funded competition and 46 percent of the state’s Republican primary electorate views him unfavorably. But his situation actually tracks pretty well with the findings of that 2021 study.
While the paper’s data could make it seem like celebrity amateurs are destined to do better than professional politicians, the authors found that the celebrity advantage disappeared when you controlled for things like share of campaign expenditures, district ideology, and the difference between the candidate’s ideology and that of the district.
In fact, all the celebrity House candidates who won general elections did so in races where their party of choice swept the election more broadly. And celebrity candidates were a lot more likely to run under favorable conditions than experienced candidates or more pedestrian amateurs.
Celebrity wins, in other words, might be indicative of the kinds of races that attract them in the first place, rather than the inherent merit of having a celebrity on the ballot. And Oz’s race just isn’t the kind celebrities easily win.