(Bloomberg) — In Los Angeles, a city built on the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, celebrities of all kinds are weighing in on Tuesday’s mayoral primary.
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Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer running for office for the first time, has won endorsements from reality TV star Kim Kardashian, singer Katy Perry and Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow. His chief rival, Congresswoman Karen Bass, has scored the backing of basketball great Magic Johnson, actresses Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Aniston, and the rapper-actor Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino.
Bass, 68, is leading the race with support from 38% of likely voters, according to a recent poll from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Caruso, 63, is in second place in the still-crowded field, with 32% likely to pick him. If, as expected, neither candidate wins more than half the vote, they’ll face each other again in the general election on Nov. 8.
The race, which pits a tough-on-crime businessman against a former community activist who’d be the city’s first Black female mayor, has drawn attention from some unusual circles. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk tweeted his support of Caruso in a rare political endorsement last week saying, “Executive competence is super underrated in politics—we should care about that a lot more!” Caruso also shared a video of Kardashian endorsing him on Twitter, in which she said, “I think that he can help with crime in our city, which is such a big issue and super scary.”
Bass has got the attention from what might be called the entertainment industry’s Democratic establishment, high-profile names such as DreamWorks co-founders Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well as writer-producer Norman Lear. Bass told Vanity Fair that Katzenberg was one of the people who convinced her to run. Meanwhile, a new generation of streaming industry leaders is also standing up. Netflix Inc. Co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos endorsed Caruso, while Jennifer Salke, who heads Amazon.com Inc.’s film and TV studios, has contributed to Bass.
While celebrity endorsements can sometimes seem surprising, there’s often an existing relationship between the candidates and their backers, according to Los Angeles political consultant Bill Carrick. The Kardashians have long had ties to the University of Southern California, where Caruso led the board of trustees until earlier this year. Comedian and actor George Lopez tweeted a video of rapper Snoop Dogg endorsing Caruso, crediting his work with community organizer “Sweet Alice” Harris. As the website Gawker noted in a recent piece, many of the celebrities endorsing Caruso don’t live in Los Angeles proper.
In the end, the clickbait that comes from celebrity endorsements may not matter as much as support from other backers, such as labor unions who can get their members out to vote, according to Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. And although Caruso has spent heavily on advertising using his personal funds, “Bass has still held a pretty stable share of the vote,” Sonenshein said.
(Adds link to Gawker article in second-to-last paragraph. An actor’s name was corrected in an earlier version of this story.)
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