At first, the showrunner Shonda Rhimes seemed to go nearly unnoticed at the strip mall in suburban Atlanta.
There was no barrage of camera shutters, no swarm of autograph seekers — only a smattering of journalists and campaign staff members and volunteers as Ms. Rhimes stood near the door and peered around. But Ms. Rhimes soon enough made quite clear who she was and why, on a Tuesday in October, she found herself at a Democratic field office outside Atlanta.
“Donald Trump’s second term will be worse,” said Ms. Rhimes, who became one of American entertainment’s most influential figures after she created the television hits “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal.”
She ticked through warnings about policies Republicans could pursue after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion and said, “In any episode of ‘Grey’s’ or ‘Scandal,’ I could not make this up. I would not make this up. But this is real. We have a problem, people, and his name is Donald Trump.”
One of the eternal questions in presidential politics, where campaigns routinely attract top-tier entertainers and politicians, is how much star power ultimately matters to voters, who routinely list issues like the economy, abortion rights and crime as more essential to their choices than celebrity appearances. But those visits often lead to attention online and in the media, which can help candidates amplify their pitches around one topic or another since, as Ms. Rhimes suggested, prominent figures are often seen as trusted, familiar messengers.
“If you watch a character on television for five years, you probably spend more time with that character for one hour a week than you do with maybe your own friends sometimes,” Ms. Rhimes said in an interview after she appeared alongside two Democratic members of Congress. “And so to me, it makes you feel like you know them more and you trust them more, and I think that’s helpful in terms of helping to get the message out.”
But she acknowledged the likely limits of Hollywood influence and signaled that, more than anything, at least some celebrities were more valued as morale boosters for worn-down operatives and volunteers.
“For me, it’s really about supporting and uplifting the people in Georgia who are already here doing all of the hard work,” she said. “There’s no belief that, you know, I’m going to show up and that’s going to change somebody’s mind, but it’s more about making sure that the people who are changing minds have the support they need.”
Along with Michelle Obama, Kerry Washington, who starred in “Scandal,” and the singer Kelly Rowland, Ms. Rhimes is scheduled to appear on Tuesday night at a When We All Vote rally in College Park, near Atlanta. Organizers have stressed that the event is a nonpartisan rally that is not tied to the campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris or Mr. Trump.
But much of Ms. Rhimes’s visit to Georgia is dedicated to Democratic events and extends her record of party activism. In 2016, for example, she was the force behind a biographical video about Hillary Clinton that played at the party’s national convention. And two years earlier, Ms. Rhimes hosted a fund-raiser that brought President Barack Obama to her California home.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has used its own batch of celebrity supporters. At Madison Square Garden on Sunday, a Trump rally included Hulk Hogan, Elon Musk and a comedian who called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” a remark that led to bipartisan condemnation and a rare distancing statement from the Trump campaign. On Wednesday, Brett Favre, the former N.F.L. quarterback, will appear at a campaign event with Mr. Trump in Green Bay, Wis.
Still, Mr. Trump’s political operation has been eager to attack the stream of celebrities who have visited Georgia and other battleground states on the Harris campaign’s behalf. On the day last week when former President Barack Obama, Tyler Perry, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee and Bruce Springsteen appeared at a Harris rally near Atlanta, the Trump campaign suggested that the vice president required “an added draw” as voters saw “the depths of Kamala’s incompetence and radicalism.”
Responding on Tuesday to the Trump campaign’s critique, Ms. Rhimes fired back: “I think that they seem to be bringing in a lot of hateful people because that’s all they have, so, to me, not really an issue.”
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