In this episode of the Fanalytics podcast, Mike Lewis, a professor at Emory University, explores the interplay between politics and sports, focusing on how different cultural segments map onto the 2024 election. He discusses significant moments when politics intersected with sports, such as Colin Kaepernick's kneeling protests and the US women's national soccer team's equal pay dispute. Using data from the Next Generation Fandom Survey, Lewis compares the fan bases of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, highlighting the differences in their cultural preferences. The survey shows that Trump fans generally have lower levels of celebrity engagement compared to Harris fans. The podcast also delves into the potential influence of key celebrities like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Taylor Swift on the election, emphasizing how their endorsements might sway voter turnout in crucial swing states. The episode concludes with insights into the broader implications of celebrity endorsements in political campaigns.
The Interplay of Politics and Sports: A Cultural Analysis | Fanalytics Podcast
Join Mike Lewis, professor at Emory University, as he examines the intricate relationship between politics and sports in this Fanalytics podcast episode. Delve into the cultural segments of political ideologies and their impact on the 2024 election, exploring fandom data from the Next Generation Fandom Survey. Discover the cultural preferences of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters, the influence of celebrities in politics, and the potential electoral sway of high-profile endorsements from figures like Taylor Swift and Elon Musk. For more in-depth analysis and data, visit www.fandomanalytics.com.
00:00 Introduction to Fanalytics Podcast
00:06 The Interplay Between Politics and Sports
02:47 Cultural Segments and Political Ideologies
05:19 Celebrity Influence in Politics
09:51 Analyzing Celebrity Popularity Among Political Fans
16:33 Do Celebrity Endorsements Matter?
17:55 Taylor Swift's Potential Impact on Elections
22:27 Conclusion and Further Resources
All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Fanalytics podcast. My name is Mike Lewis professor at Emory university. Today, we're going to continue hitting the theme of politics though. I mean, I guess we should say really the interplay between politics and sports. Now there's going to be some numbers in the background.
I'm not going to mention too many numbers as we, as we go through the material today. But, you know, you want to follow our fuller description of what's going on. You want to see more of the baseline data. From the next generation fandom survey, you can find that at www dot fandomanalytics.com dot com. Alright, sports and politics. You know, I think it's often said that. Uh, you know, politics as a result of culture. My take on all this as a little bit different and that politics, sports entertainment. They're all part of the culture. You know, they're, they're all simultaneously moving and interacting and affecting each other over the last couple of years.
And I think it ebbs and flows. Over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of politics involved in sports, you know, and I think. You know, the, the, the really key moment was Colin Kaepernick in his kneeling Anthem protests. You know, this. This was about the same time as the us women's national soccer team. And they're equal pay and you can put, say, equal pay and in quotes, um, their, their equal pay dispute. Uh, you know, coming through COVID we had, um, racial justice messages on courts and an NFL field.
Right. So, so politics. And sports have always been, you know, essentially next door neighbors. And this, this makes a lot of sense, right? It's you know, what are sports what's entertainment. These are the cultural entities that people care about the people watch. So if you're interested in political power, If you're interested in making a political point, of course, you're going to gravitate towards. Towards sports.
It's a big platform with a lot of eyes on it. So they're really natural. Yeah, they're natural neighbors that are gunna logins. And so as we go into the, the, really the act of season of this. Political campaign, the Trump Harris. Campaign. Popular culture forces. Sports entities. These folks are gonna tend to get involved.
Maybe not effectively, maybe not consistently. But. The feelings are so deep and the passions are so, so inflamed. That these things are all almost always going to come together. So the topic for today is really trying to think about how different cultural segments. Map on to this election, 2024. So, what I'm really want to get at is how, if you look at the people who are fans of Donald Trump, And the fans of Kamala Harris. What are those groups, fans off? Right.
So the goal today is to talk about and do a little bit of a deep dive. Into how different cultural segments map onto political ideologies and sensibilities. One of the things that always brings to my mind, at least the importance or the relevance of popular culture, or perhaps irrelevance, are the national conventions. Right? So inevitably the Republican National Convention is light on star power. Scott Baio, Kevin Sorbo, Dean Cain, TV Superman, Ted Nugent, now perhaps Kid Rock.
But in general, there aren't a lot of celebrities. Now this, this, this raises some, you know, some important questions. Are we lacking celebrities that are Conservative or are celebrities not of that much appeal to the conservative base? It's, I think it sounds like a simple question and I think the initial answer would usually be that, well we just don't have a lot of conservative celebrities.
But I think it is worth investigating a little bit deeper in terms of thinking about conservatives involvement with popular culture. Now on the other hand, The DNC can be very much a star studded affair. Now this year's, you know, the big gets were Barack and Michelle Obama, but there was a rumor that Beyonce was going to show up.
So, you know, in the run, look, in the run up to, um, to Biden withdrawing, George Clooney, Julia Roberts were major players. Madonna has been outspoken. We've got Beyonce. Taylor Swift has been frequently mentioned as a, as someone that they really want an endorsement from. So the level of star power is very, is very different.
Now again, when DNC, we can say, well, celebrities tend to, Hollywood tend to be liberal, but I think there is a deeper question here in terms of, are liberals more affected by popular culture by celebrities? So, one of the things that I've done over the years is I've created this Next Generation Fandom Survey.
And as part of that, and so the survey is about 2, 000 people. Split across Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. And within this part of the, the, and a lot, there's a lot of sports content in there, of course, but I do ask for their evaluation of 45 different celebrities, um, where the celebrities range from LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, I try and get a real variety, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Aniston.
So a lot of different folks. And so what I want to talk about today is looking at, and, and because it was a political year, I also did ask about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, well, Joe Biden at the point where I did the survey, but, but Kamala Harris was also, was also on there. Asking the question, are you fans of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris?
This gives me an opportunity to see what the hardcore political supporters of each candidate are, are at, who they are actually fans of. And I think this can paint an interesting picture of how our culture is, is set up. What parts of popular culture appeal to the political left and what parts appeal to the political right? Okay, so the Next Generation Fandom Survey has 45 different celebrities and then about 15 different political figures. At the time I was really trying to get at potential of Trump running mates. J. D. Vance was not on the, was not on the survey list. The first thing to look at is, just in terms of the background setting this up, is looking at the fandom rates for Trump and Harris.
Now, at the point when this was done, this was before Harris had her media moment, right? And again, I've got mixed feelings on this. I, I think The media push for Harris has been unprecedented and frankly, if you're a honest observer of politics, frankly disturbing how she was slotted, just slotted into this and went from a fairly unpopular vice president to a fairly popular presidential candidate.
So, when we look at the fandom rates, Trump's baseline fandom is actually significantly higher than Harris's. Um, look, I also ask about negatives, but Trump was about 27 percent versus about 20 percent for Harris. So Trump has more core fans. Now this is an important thing in politics, right, because fans are the people that will donate, volunteer, etc.
Uh, it's not clear to me, look, to me, what's really fascinating about this election is that Harris was a fairly unpopular person. She's now running this as a almost pure marketing campaign where everything is controlled. to really avoid having, like, she was the vice president, and so if she was unpopular, it's not like she was unknown.
So what's fascinating to me about this is she's essentially trying to avoid showing her real persona to the electorate through, through November. Okay, so Trump has more fans, Harris has less fans. When you start to look across the entire sample of celebrities, and the celebrities include LeBron James, Shohei Ohtani, Patrick Mahomes, Nikola Jokic, Colin Kaepernick, Lionel Richie, Lionel Messi, Serena Williams, uh, Megan Rapinoe, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Pete Davidson, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Tom Cruise, Ryan Gosling, Dave Chappelle, Alex Earle from, from TikTok, Caitlin Clark, Selena Gomez, Joe Rogan, Jake Paul, Ariana Grande.
So, I'm not going to read all the names, but you get a sense of what I'm trying to accomplish. I've got folks from music, I've got folks from sports, I've got international athletes, I've got retired athletes. So I'm trying to do a real cross section of American celebrities. And again, even going beyond, like I've got an F1 driver on there, international tennis players, international soccer players.
So when I look across this entire sample of 45, One of the most striking things is that right off the bat, the Trump fans have much lower levels of preference than the Kamala Harris fans. Okay, so I asked people to rate them on a scale of one to seven. One can't stand them. Seven, I'm a complete fan. And the Kamala Harris fans rate the average celebrity on the list as about a 4.
9, while the Donald Trump fans have about a 4. 3. So again, you know, I referenced this when we're talking about when I was talking about the the conventions. There is evidence that political conservatives, people with right wing ideologies, are disengaged from popular culture, and I look, I think that's a very legitimate point of view for them to have.
Is this culture being produced for them? Are they ever the target audience? Okay, so what we do is identify the fans of Donald Trump and the fans of Kamala Harris, right? Because again, the goal here is to identify the cultural segments that are particularly relevant to campaign 2024. So I got 45 celebrities. I look at the rating by Trump fans. I look at the rating by Kamala fans, and then I plot all this so I can create it.
And you can find this picture on fandomanalytics. com. So I've got this picture that shows essentially who, how much, you know, Trump fans and Kamala fans are of a given celebrity. So this is, it's a way of mapping the cultural space. Okay. Before we get into where these two segments disagree. It's also kind of fascinating to talk about where they do agree.
If you look at the corner, the quadrant of this analysis, where celebrities are beloved by both Trump fans and Kamala fans. And again, thinking about with a ultra polarized society, think about what an achievement. These folks are pulling off. You got folks like Dolly Parton. I think Dolly Parton is the most beloved celebrity in America.
You've got Shaquille O'Neal. You've got Michael Jordan. So you've got folks with a lot of history whose politics are probably relatively unknown. Right? Michael Jordan, famous for saying Republicans buy sneakers too, in response to them wanting to be, him to be involved. I think it was a North Carolina Senate election.
Uh, Shaquille, I don't know what his politics are. Uh, Shaquille's public persona is he's a very nice guy, having fun going through life, paying for stuff for people, and it turns out that he ends up being absolutely beloved. Dolly Parton, country music, Dollywood, you might think that skews conservative, but truly, I have no idea.
So, this ends up being, and again, remember, this survey goes from Gen Z all the way through baby boomers. So, those, that group of celebrities, the group that did not come of age during the internet era, are universally beloved. At the other side, you got folks like, in terms of not, you know, Not really great popularity across any of the demographic segments.
Alex Earl, Jake Paul, Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee. So the more recent celebrities, and so there's a logic to this, that the more recent celebrities have less But it's also, there's also something important about this that the folks that have coming of age during a media environment, that's more fragmented and more smartphone driven, are having less of an ability to break through and become what I'm what I would refer to as unifying celebrities, right?
People tend to have You might be incredibly popular TikTok or on Vine and then YouTube or on a Netflix show celebrity is not translating to the larger culture at this point. Those are some interesting observations Now, when you start to map the differences between Trump fans and Kamala hands, you get, you get results that are not like they're not particularly surprising when I map these things, some of the folks that are the most skewed towards Kamala Harris are Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, Megan Markle, LeBron James, Serena Williams, right now, Serena.
I don't know that she really belongs in that group, but the other four have been fairly political. Um, Kaepernick and Rapinoe have been, you know, they're athletes, but they're also known as political advocates. So that ends up being the core of, the core of Kamala Harris support. That's totally on brand, right?
Progressive celebrities. And that's where her fan base is differentiated. Now, on the other side, the folks that really skew heavily towards Donald Trump, and the one name that really dominates in all this, is Elon Musk. Elon Musk is a fascinating, like a critical figure in all this. In past elections, The Democrats tend to enjoy a lot of media support and in the last couple of elections, significantly more financial support.
So the ultra big money coming to the side of Trump and also someone trying to create a media, an important social media channel in X slash Twitter is really an important development. I think people know it's an important development. I suspect they underestimate how important it is. Other folks in this, Joe Rogan, You think about what Rogan is known for, and again, it's going to depend on who you're talking to.
Rogan might be viewed as someone seeking truth, trying to speak honestly, or he might be a reflection of conspiracy theories and bro culture. But the comparison of Colin Kaepernick, Meghan Markle, Meghan Rapinoe, LeBron James on one side and on the other side, Rogan, Musk, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Morgan Wallen.
It does paint a very stark picture of the cultural divide between Trump fans and Kamala fans, between progressives and between conservatives.
Okay, now the last thing, now the last thing I want to do is ask the question of, do celebrities matter? Do celebrity endorsements matter? Does having a celebrity show up at the DNC or the RNC? Do these things actually shift votes? Okay, so the quick answer is probably a no. In general, in general, I don't think endorsements mean very much.
I think overwhelmingly. Our politics are now based on identities rather than ideologies. And so a hardcore conservative, you know, saying Donald Trump's the way to go, or a hardcore progressive saying, you know, Kamala Harris is the way to go. These things tend not to mean very much at this point. And so the same thing with celebrities, but that being said, are there specific celebrities that can matter?
I've already talked a little bit about Elon Musk. Elon Musk is bringing an infrastructure with him. So Elon, Elon Musk can potentially matter. Someone like Joe Rogan with a massive audience can potentially matter. The one I want to focus on though. Is the one that's been in the news, uh, or at least the news in terms of people wanting to speculate if she would make an endorsement.
And that's Taylor Swift. So would Taylor make an endorsement of the Joe Biden or Kamala Harris now, and would it be possible for her to also have Travis Kelsey join with her? Okay, so here's the question and, and again. There are very few celebrities that really have the amount of influence to change people's preferences.
Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, very select group. But here's the question, do the numbers actually, do the numbers actually work out? So some back of the envelope kind of calculations with, with Taylor Swift. Okay, so she sold about 4 million tickets. Okay, so let's say. 4 million is the hardcore Swifty army and you gotta remember the Swifties are an impressive fandom, right?
They back her up in every broken romance, in her disputes with Scooter Braun. They are as hardcore of a fandom as you are going to see in 2024. So 4 million people and so let's take a million off the top. bring us down to 3 million people. We'll say a million of the people buying tickets are not of age to vote. So of that 3 million, let's say 40 percent break for Harris, 20 percent break for Trump. Again, that's not a, that's not a guess. I've got some data on that to suggest that's about their proportions.
So 1. 2 million Harris voter liens. What percentage of those are actually going to turn out to vote? So let's say it's 50%.
That leaves 600, 000 potential Harris leaning voters. So let's say that she can get, and 600, 000 is, this is across the entire nation, that probably translates to about 50, 000 in, um, that probably translates to about 50, 000 in swing states. Okay, so these are people that are into Harris. They're also Swifties, and there's 50, 000 of them in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona.
If she can convert half of them to voters, that's 25, 000 votes. Okay, so let's keep that number in mind, that of the Harris leaning folks, if she can get in the swing states that weren't going to vote, if she can get 25 percent of them to the polls, 25, 000 votes. Okay, in terms of our breakdown of 40 to 20, that leaves 40 percent that are really not that interested in the political process.
But we gotta remember, these are Swifties. These are folks that take her side. They essentially worship her as an, as an icon. So 1. 2 million of these left. Uh, 300, 3 million tickets sold, 40 percent of those. That equates to probably about 100, 000 in, again, those aforementioned swing states. If she can get 15 percent of those to say, Hey, Taylor says this is important.
We're going to do it. That's another 15, 000 votes. So back of the envelope, we're talking about 40, 000 potential votes in swing states, okay. In terms of the overall U. S. population. A drop in the bucket in terms of the population of these states, again, a drop in the bucket. But when you realize that some of these swing states are being decided by about 10, 000 votes or 15, 000 votes blocks of 40, 000 votes in swing states are the most valuable political economy you can imagine.
And you can easily imagine a Taylor Swift delivering that scale of voting. And again, you know, I made some really kind of quick, quick calculations. It's very conceivable that you're talking about her bringing 50, 000 voters in these swing states. So again, in an election that can be decided by 10, 000 votes here, 15, 000 votes here, there are a few celebrities that can be
I'm going to end the podcast here. Uh, like I said, especially for this one, where there's a bunch of data in the background, there's going to be more content at www. fandomanalytics. com, and I'll talk to you guys next week. Thank you. Bye.