Given that Hollywood is often caricatured as a hotbed of liberalism, it’s surprising that Republicans seem so much better than Democrats at the showbiz side of politics. Two Republican presidents have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, as does the former Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet among liberals there persists a sense that running celebrities for public office is somehow déclassé, cynical or simply not something a serious party does.
The Democrats need to reckon with a new reality: The electorate wants to be entertained. Instead of continuing to run highly credentialed political lifers, the party needs to embrace the idea of the celebrity candidate — and find someone with sincerely-held progressive beliefs, sky-high name recognition and experience winning over the kinds of voters who’ve supported the MAGA movement. In other words, they need to find someone like Jerry Springer.
Mr. Springer, who died in 2023, is best known for his gleefully distasteful TV show, which for nearly three decades featured a parade of cheating spouses, incestuous siblings and rowdy strippers who routinely erupted in brutal onstage brawls. With his glasses, jacket and tie, Mr. Springer would hang back at a safe distance, an unlikely instigator standing amid a jeering crowd and politely asking questions.
Yes, that Jerry Springer should serve as a model for the kind of standard-bearer Democrats should be looking for: a professionally famous person with an intuitive grasp of attention, a flair for drama and conflict, and a proven ability to communicate with a broad audience regardless of its political affiliations.
As a celebrity, Mr. Springer had none of the glamour of, say, a Beyoncé, a George Clooney or a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — some of the names occasionally mentioned as possible political recruits. But that’s the point. For Democrats, the issue of being perceived as talking down to voters is one that the party continues to struggle with. Many of the voters who improbably regard Mr. Trump, a gilded billionaire, as an everyman with a common touch, cheered for Mr. Springer because he seemed relatable and never condescending. That kind of figure, coupled with a talent for showmanship, might prove a recipe for success now, even more so than it did for Mr. Springer during the political career he began in advance of rising to fame as a talk-show host.
Before Mr. Springer became an icon of bad taste, and before his name — Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! — became a kind of tawdry war cry, he had a promising career in government. He was an idealistic and ambitious progressive reformer elected to office in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the 1970s as a city councilman. He appealed to countercultural college students and blue-collar workers alike. During his time in City Hall, he opposed the Vietnam War, led a successful campaign to create a city-owned bus system and advocated reforms at the local jail. He resigned from the City Council in 1974, following a prostitution scandal — a seeming career ender at the time, though one he came back from, successfully reclaiming his seat and then serving as mayor of Cincinnati.
Both his political gifts and his nose for spectacle would contribute to his rise as a big-tent TV celebrity. That tent included many of the kind of people Hillary Clinton would later label “deplorables,” an infamous slight. Even as his studio audience — and many critics — sneered at Mr. Springer’s guests and judged him for putting them on his televised circus, he always managed to seem genuinely interested in them: their feelings, their decisions and occasionally their hopes for the future.
After Mr. Springer ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in the Ohio governor’s race in 1982, he essentially stumbled into a career in media — first as a pundit delivering commentaries on the news, then as an Emmy-winning evening news anchor, then, starting in 1991, as the host of a daytime talk show focused on current affairs and human interest stories.
After a stretch of incurably low ratings, “The Jerry Springer Show” began its transformation into the shocking free-for-all that we remember, and he became an international celebrity. But he spent the rest of his life looking for ways to get back into politics, even as his infamy made the prospect less viable. He seriously explored running for statewide office again in Ohio during three separate election cycles, starting around the time of his show’s commercial peak in the late 1990s. He found that neither voters nor party leaders were willing to look past his TV show: A University of Cincinnati poll in 2003 found that he had an unfavorability rating of 71 percent.
Many found the idea of Mr. Springer in the Senate not just implausible but offensive. Representative Ted Strickland, who would later become Ohio’s governor, denounced Mr. Springer as someone “who abuses damaged, vulnerable people for his own purpose” and swore he’d never share a stage with him.
Mr. Springer ended up not running in 2003, channeling his passion for politics into a radio show on Air America, the short-lived experiment in progressive talk radio. His radio show — on which he talked about issues like abortion, the death penalty and public education — aired alongside that of another entertainer turned political aspirant: the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian and future senator from Minnesota, Al Franken.
It was in 2017, the year after Mr. Trump’s election, that Mr. Springer and his inner circle of supporters thought perhaps his moment had finally come, and they began kicking the tires on a campaign for governor of Ohio. If Americans could be convinced to vote for one famous guy they’d seen on a cheesy TV show, why wouldn’t they embrace another? As Mr. Springer said of Mr. Trump, “His constituency is basically mine. These are fans of the show.”
Several of Mr. Springer’s advisers told me that, in a general election, they had no doubt he would have won the Ohio statehouse, by bringing home the kinds of lifelong Democratic voters who had switched to Mr. Trump in 2016. An Ohio State senator, Bill DeMora, told me of Springer fans: “They related to somebody like Jerry Springer, because he talked to them, not down to them.”
In hindsight, Mr. Springer’s story lends credence to the notion that politics and entertainment have more in common than we like to admit. If nothing else, Democrats must get past their aversion to the unseriousness of celebrity and treat it as a selling point, not a stumbling block. Why not Oprah Winfrey? Or the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith? Or the “Shark Tank” personality and billionaire Mark Cuban? Just pick someone who’s willing to run, who’s good at their job, and who lots of people like. Democrats would do well not to let the next Jerry Springer slip away.
Leon Nefaykh is the creator and host of the podcast “Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer,” an Audible Original, and the co-creator of the “Slow Burn” podcast.
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