Philippa Kaur

TV personality Mehmet Oz lost his bid for Pennsylvania senator during the November midterms. And former NFL football star Herschel Walker appears to be falling further behind his opponent, incumbent Raphael Warnock, as they head to a Dec. 6, 2022, runoff election for senator in Georgia.

While celebrity political candidates have advantages, like name recognition and media attention, they often lose their bids for public office.

They lose for the same reasons other candidates lose. If they represent the minority party in a one-party-dominated district or state, they lose. If they take unpopular policy positions, they lose. If they are never considered to be serious candidates, they lose.

I am a political science scholar who specializes in American politics. In my recently published book, “Celebrities in American Elections,” I show that celebrity candidates who win the fundraising battle tend to win their elections – and those who fall behind in fundraising tend to lose.

Political fundraising matters

Both Oz and Walker lost the fundraising battle against their opponents, Democratic politicians John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock, in the November 2022 midterms.

Not including substantial spending by outside political and advocacy groups, Federal Election Commission data shows that Fetterman raised US$17 million more than Oz and Warnock raised $86 million more than Walker.

The ability to raise money is an indicator of a candidate’s strength. It also allows candidates to hire professional staff and pay for advertising to persuade voters.

Candidates, celebrity or not, who raise more money tend to win.

There are many examples that show the specific connection between celebrity candidates raising money during campaigns and getting elected.

Hollywood stars Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger all spent more money than their opponents and got elected. Singer Sonny Bono, meanwhile, spent more than his rival in the mayoral and House races and won in the 1980s and ‘90s. When Bono spent less than his opponent on his Senate seat bid in 1992, he lost the race.

Other examples show the link between celebrity candidates’ failure to top their opponents in fundraising and their eventual loss.

Hollywood performers Shirley Temple, Gary Coleman, Roseanne Barr, Cynthia Nixon, Kanye West and Caitlyn Jenner all raised less than their opponents and lost their elections.

Self-financed candidates who rely predominantly on their own wealth, like Dr. Oz, tend to lose. Because self-financed candidates tend to be political outsiders, they are less likely to be supported by the political insiders who are major donors. The donor class tends to support stronger, more experienced candidates.

Actress Cynthia Nixon, who ran for governor in New York, conceded to Andrew Cuomo at a Brooklyn restaurant in September 2018.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Other rules to the game

There are other trends at play during an election. Some of them include whether a candidate is an incumbent and has name recognition and what their party affiliation is. And while celebrity candidates certainly have many advantages, they are not as popular as some observers would suspect.

Pennsylvania and Georgia have been key swing states in recent election cycles, with both the presidency and control of the Senate linked to their voters’ choices.

Political science consistently shows that it is easier to flip an open seat than it is to defeat an incumbent.

Republican Sen. Pat Toomey announced in October 2020 that he would not run again for election in Pennsylvania. That opened the door for Democrats to flip the seat.

Fetterman, a statewide elected official with a strong base of support, name recognition and a fundraising advantage, secured this open seat on Nov. 8. Democrats were worried about losing the race after Fetterman’s poor debate performance, but he nevertheless prevailed.

While Oz had name recognition thanks to his television show, he was successfully defined as a carpetbagger in the state and could not match his opponent’s spending.

In Georgia, incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, has a base of support, name recognition and a fundraising advantage. Walker has the name recognition, but he faced questions about his mental fitness and seemed inept on the campaign trail. Although the race is undecided, Walker’s inexperience showed and he has been outspent by Warnock thus far.

For Walker to win the runoff, a few things would need to happen.

Walker would need to gain the votes of the Libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver, who thus far hasn’t endorsed either Walker or Warnock. Turnout in the runoff election is also critical. Polls indicate that Walker leads among voters 50 and older. Older voters tend to vote at higher rates than younger voters, which means Walker has the lead with higher-propensity voters. On the other hand, younger voters seem more energized than in the recent past. Warnock, who has experience with runoff elections, would need to keep young people energized for a few more weeks in order to win.

Finally, in most states, candidates, celebrity or not, can win with a plurality of voters. Indeed, many celebrities who won elected office did so with less than 50% of the vote.

Wrestler Jesse Ventura won with 37% of the vote when he was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. Arnold Schwarzenegger became the governor of California in 2003 with 49% of the vote. Comedian Al Franken got less than 42% of the vote when he was elected Minnesota senator in 2008. And Donald Trump got 46% of the popular vote when he won the presidency in 2016.

The United States’ plurality rule, which allows a candidate who receives the most number of votes to win, and Electoral College systems have allowed celebrities to win elections even when they have less than a majority. This does not suggest overwhelming popularity; rather, their victories are made possible by specific election rules.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is an example of a celebrity who succeeded in politics and won office in California in 2003.
John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images

Future celebrity candidates

Oz and Walker won’t be the last celebrities to seek public office. Celebrities have the talent and fame to make them viable political candidates. They are at ease in front of cameras and audiences and they are skilled at creating a personal brand that resonates with the public.

They also benefit from copious media coverage. The free media attention gives them an advantage that noncelebrity candidates do not have.

But it’s likely that celebrities who had political experience before running for office would perform better than celebrities who are political neophytes.

Schwarzenegger and Franken offer an example of how it can benefit celebrity candidates to be involved in politics before seeking office. Schwarzenegger, for example, first campaigned for Proposition 49, a law that created after-school educational enrichment programs, before officially diving into politics.

Franken founded the political action committee Midwest Values and called upon his celebrity friends to donate so he could fund Democratic candidates who would later serve as his political allies. This allowed Schwarzenegger and Franken to learn valuable political skills before running for office. Even Trump was an active political donor and celebrity endorser before declaring his bid for the presidency.

Oz’s loss and Walker’s current deficit demonstrate that even celebrities must pay their political dues before seeking office. More

If you fish in your pocket or purse for a U.S. quarter today, there’s a chance you’ll see Wilma Mankiller’s face. She was the Cherokee Nation’s first female principal chief, and she inspired generations of Cherokees and young Native people like me.

In 2022, Mankiller was one of the first women honored by appearing on a series of quarters, along with renowned poet and activist Maya Angelou and physicist and astronaut Sally Ride. Mankiller’s quarter, issued in the summer of 2022, marks the first time that a Native American woman has been featured on a U.S. coin since Sacagawea appeared on the golden dollar in 2000.

As a historian of Native American history, I credit my professional career to Mankiller, whom I heard speak at Salem Women’s College when I was an undergraduate student there. I had never seen a non-Native audience listen so intently to a woman who looked like my father’s ancestors and grew up in rural Oklahoma, as he did. Like many young Cherokee people, I was raised outside the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation.

Following her lecture, I tore through her autobiography, “Mankiller: A Chief and Her People.” In her book and through her life’s work, Mankiller introduced a generation of people not just to Cherokee history but also to a model of Native women’s leadership, leading by listening to the voices from her community and supporting the programs they sought.

Early life

Mankiller’s life resembled many Native people’s lives in the 20th century before she assumed the role of principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985.

She was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, at an Indian hospital in 1945. She grew up on land secured by Cherokee people over three generations of shifting U.S. federal Indian policies, each with devastating results: the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the Treaty of 1866 and the Curtis Act in 1898.

Mankiller’s family relocated to San Francisco in the 1950s after Congress passed the termination and relocation policy, seeking to break up and relocate Native American tribes to assimilate them. In San Francisco she met Indigenous people from diverse communities.

Mankiller’s duties as chief included attending the Arkansas Riverbed Authority meetings to discuss multiple Native communities’ access to water.
Tom Gilbert/Tulsa World via AP Images

She came of age in San Francisco during the Red Power Movement, which was marked by Indigenous people’s activism across the country and aimed to draw attention to broken treaty promises, widespread dispossession and police brutality. She and her siblings supported the occupation of Alcatraz, a takeover by Native activists that lasted 18 months.

She married young, had children and willed herself through a college education. She divorced and returned home to Oklahoma in 1976 as a single parent with two daughters. Mankiller’s family history, like that of so many Native Americans in this country, cannot be told or understood without understanding changes in federal Indian policy, which often dictated where Native people lived and the economic opportunities available to them.

What she means to Cherokee people

Mankiller’s life was similar to those of many families who remained in Oklahoma on allotments or within Cherokee communities after Oklahoma became a state in 1907. Until the age of 11, she grew up in Adair County, which was about 46% Cherokee in the 2020 census.

When she returned to Oklahoma from California in the late 1970s to work for the Cherokee Nation, she prioritized and supported a community-driven project that brought running water to the Bell community. Bell, a rural community in Adair County, is still home to large pockets of Cherokee people. This effort was later dramatized in the 2013 film “The Cherokee Word for Water.” Mankiller’s commitment to improving the lives of Cherokee people was central to her work, even before she became chief.

Her rise to the position of principal chief in 1985 coincided with a moment when the efforts of civil rights activists, Black nationalists, Red Power and women’s rights activists of the previous decades were bearing fruit. She represented and modeled what people like Gloria Steinem, with whom Mankiller formed an enduring friendship, hoped to see more people achieve in the larger U.S.

President Clinton awards Wilma Mankiller the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images

Mankiller’s impact extended beyond Cherokee people. In a nod to her accomplishments, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Mankiller understood that she represented how far women leaders had come and the hope we might still arrive where we need to be.

I still remember learning of her death from pancreatic cancer in April 2010 when I was a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not far from Salem College where she first inspired me. I, like many others I imagine, wept for her, enormously proud of all she had achieved.

The Cherokee value of gadugi

Mankiller’s transition to chief wasn’t easy. People initially questioned a woman’s ability to lead the tribe. If there was any doubt of Mankiller’s capabilities as a leader when she took over as chief in 1985, in her second election to office six years later, she received almost 83% of the vote.

She gained support by exemplifying gadugi – a Cherokee word that means working together collectively for the benefit of the whole community. She drew upon her culture, history and tribal identity as a leader, and she raised her daughters Gina and Felicia Olaya to do the same. Though neither held office, both have worked for and supported the Cherokee Nation throughout their lives.

During her time as chief, Mankiller provided a foundation for the continued growth of the Cherokee Nation. Enrollment in Cherokee Nation doubled under her leadership. She championed education and secured a US$9 million vocational center. A 1991 Parade Magazine profile described her leadership style as quiet but strong.

At her mother’s memorial, Gina, who died in October 2022, said that her mother taught her family “how to laugh, how to dance, to appreciate Motown music, to be a humble servant to our people, to love one another unequivocally and to cherish each and every moment we spent together as a family.”

Mankiller articulated what generations of Cherokee people knew – that Indigenous people are capable of generating the solutions to the problems they face. As chief, she focused on issues that benefited some of the most vulnerable Cherokee people, such as rural development, housing, employment and education. Mankiller listened to community members to determine the way forward. I believe her legacy, now enshrined on a quarter, will continue to inspire new generations of people seeking to make a difference in the world. More

During the month leading up to the US midterm elections, talk of a commanding Republican victory went from a “red wave” to a “red tsunami”. The Republicans were on for the win. The polls and gambling markets, or so-called “prediction markets”, were confident.

Only the red wave never broke – Democrats tightened their shaky grip on the Senate and, while they lost control of the House, they did so by a much narrower margin than had been expected.

As part of my research on political betting and gambling markets, I’ve identified a surge of interest in political gambling since the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. Underdog victories in these contests alerted many people in the UK and US – but also internationally – to the opportunity to win big by gambling on politics. And, along with the latest polls, what the betting markets are saying is increasingly considered a good predictor of future events. But not this time.

In the run-up to the US midterm, I was betting (with my own money) against the Republican wave and for a close election – not out of any particular insight so much as caution.

When the results began to trickle in and it became clear the predicted Republican takeover was not happening, I had an unexpectedly successful few days of profits. Meanwhile, I frantically tried to figure out why the betting markets had predicted otherwise and what this failure meant.

Why so wrong?

To understand why the gambling markets got it so wrong, we first need to look at what evidence there was for a red wave.

1. History says so

First up there’s historical precedence. The party of a first-term US president almost always loses significant numbers of seats in both houses of Congress in the midterms two years after they are elected.

2. The polls tightened

The polls also indicated that a red wave could happen. Democrats took the lead in the polls in mid-June, but the lead started narrowing in mid-September, with the Democrats and Republicans tied on 50 senate seats each on November 1.

Why was the midterm result such a surprise?
EPA

3. Predictions went red

While some polls indicated a tight race, organisations using more complex predictive models swung towards Republicans. By election day, FiveThirtyEight, the highest-profile of these organisations, was predicting the Republicans would take control of the Senate 59 times out of a hundred – and people listened.

4. The odds were high

This meant the markets were heavily favouring Republicans by late October. On the UK site Betfair, the world’s largest betting exchange, the likelihood of a republican majority shot above 50% on October 19 and peaked at 78% on election day – only to crash to 12% a day later as results began to become clear. On the foremost US provider, PredictIt, Republicans were trading at around 75 cents a share (a winning share returns US$1, a losing share 0 cents) before they, too, crashed in the face of election count data.

Inflated victory

Now looking back, it’s clear that a market bubble had inflated around a Republican victory. One of the maxims repeated in political betting circles is “bet the trend, not the poll” and the trend, as evidenced in the polling, started shifting sharply towards Republicans before then levelling off. Betters and modellers projected the original trend towards Republicans and ignored the levelling off.

There were some in the community who were arguing against the crowd – that the odds had shifted too far towards the Republicans. But their voices were drowned out in a sea of optimism (or pessimism, depending on your politics). Indeed, Matthew Shaddick, head of politics at the UK betting exchange Smarkets, spoke about it on the company podcast. He said that the last month before the election was “one-way traffic” with everyone wanting to back Republicans.

Not quite as expected.
EPA

The sophistication and budgets of election campaigns in the US are also so extensive that considerable effort is made to influence the narrative through polling. According to my contacts, there was a flurry of Republican-leaning polls that were pushing their chances. And, as we know, polls influence people’s decisions when it comes to betting.

I’m also often asked whether political parties might bet on themselves to improve the perception of their campaign. While this is less likely to have any consequence with larger events such as the US elections, as with polling, at a smaller scale it can have an effect on a candidate’s implied probability of winning, which can then filter into the media.

There is more research to be done, but this failure of prediction could not come at a worse time for US political gambling providers, styled as prediction markets. They have been trying to convince a sceptical regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that political gambling markets add value to politics and financial traders because of their predictive potency. Indeed, gambling markets are usually considered much more accurate than polls, but it’s hard to see the midterms as anything other than a failure of prediction. More