Trump and the Celebrity-Candidate Phenomenon

Democrats are still licking their wounds from defeats in last week’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Some are calling for the party to refocus on popular moderate policies. Perhaps that’s the most realistic path forward; it’s the formula that top Republicans settled on following their own stinging electoral defeat in 2012. But instead of following its party leadership’s prescription, the GOP base nominated a celebrity, and rode his popularity to electoral triumph. Why can’t Democrats do the same?

After all, former President (and former reality-TV star) Donald Trump is currently tied with the two-term wartime president George W. Bush for the rank of most famous Republican, according to YouGov. He is also the second-most-popular Republican, after Arnold Schwarzenegger, another former entertainer. The late actor Ronald Reagan consistently ranks among Americans’ favorite presidents. But if you define celebrity as “initially well known for something other than politics,” the Democrats—the party that once counted the comedian Al Franken, the basketball player Bill Bradley, and the astronaut John Glenn among its elected officials—now have no celebrities among their 20 most well-known or 20 most popular politicians.

The argument in favor of the Democrats recruiting more-famous candidates is pretty clear cut: Celebrity offers a number of important advantages to aspiring politicians. Most Americans consume more television than political news, so they see more actors than they do legislators. Trump was the best-known GOP primary candidate in 2015: 92 percent of Republicans and independents said they were familiar with him, compared with 81 percent who said they were familiar with the next-best-known candidate, Jeb Bush. In one 2016 poll, 96 percent of respondents correctly identified a photo of Trump. Some preliminary research suggests that Trump performed better in the 2016 Republican primary in areas where more people had watched The Apprentice.

As trust in institutions craters, people may look to unconventional candidates for leadership. “This is happening all around the world,” says Eunji Kim, a Vanderbilt University political-science professor. Ukraine’s president is currently a man who played Ukraine’s president on TV. A boxer and an actor—two different guys—are currently running for president of the Philippines.

In crowded primary fields, or in nonpartisan elections, fame can be especially helpful. Name recognition—the main advantage celebrity buys you—matters primarily in “low information” elections. That’s because in any multiparty election, the most important factor influencing whether someone will vote for a candidate is their party affiliation. Republicans vote for Republicans; Democrats vote for Democrats. But in elections that don’t have a partisan divide—like most primaries and some mayoral races—the candidate who is more well-known has an edge.

“What do people know about the…