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Americans are fed up with politics invading every aspect of their lives. But many can’t kick the habit. Roughly 60 percent of Americans say it feels like politics are everywhere these days where it does not make sense for things to be political, according to new results from The POLITICO Poll. It’s a rare point of harmony between Republicans and Democrats, with majorities of both parties also agreeing that it is becoming less important what celebrities say about politics. Unless they agree with them. The same people who want politics out of everyday life are still influenced when the celebrities’ or athletes’ opinions align with their own. Nearly 70 percent of voters who backed Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would think “more positively” about a movie star if they spoke out against President Donald Trump. The inverse is also true: For nearly 60 percent of the president’s voters, their perception of a star would improve if they expressed support for him. That picture comes into even sharper relief among the strongest partisans, who are more likely to expect that their favorite celebrities and institutions around them express their political views than those who are more in the middle. This article is part of an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas. You can find new surveys and analysis each month at politico.com/poll. Have questions or comments? Ideas for future surveys? Email us at poll@politico.com. That presents a complicated and often contradictory picture of how voters engage in politics as it bleeds into their daily lives — and the precarious line celebrities and local leaders need to walk as culture and politics become hard to detangle. Celebrities and athletes have increasingly spoken out about causes like ICE crackdowns and racial equity on the world stage. Key culture podcasts — from the Joe Rogan Experience to Call Her Daddy — have hosted politicians including Trump and Harris. And actors like George Clooney were critical in calling for former President Joe Biden to end his 2024 campaign. “Everyone should always speak up for what they believe in,” said Jordan C. Brown, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist who has worked with campaigns and celebrities alike. “But there is a cost, and I think I would just caution people of the cost.” The result is an American public that doesn’t quite know what it wants, one that’s tired of their lives being politicized — but are also influenced by partisan statements. Voters still care about where celebrities and institutions stand Majorities of both Harris and Trump voters say politics has invaded spaces where it doesn’t belong, but Trump voters are more concerned than Harris voters are. For example, most Trump voters (52 percent) say there is too much politics in sports, compared to 31 percent of Harris voters who say the same. In some areas of daily life — like sports, movies and on television, and music — pluralities of Harris voters say there’s an acceptable amount of politics present. But few Americans say they want more. Some Americans also claim bringing politics into other realms doesn’t affect them. A plurality of Harris voters — 38 percent — say it doesn’t matter to them if athletes, for example, talk about politics. And yet, the poll finds, Republicans and Democrats alike actually are swayed by statements from businesses and celebrities. Strong majorities report that celebrities’, athletes’ or even their local grocery store owners’ political statements impact their views of that individual. And roughly one in five people say they have changed their own opinion on a political topic because a celebrity spoke out about it. The poll results also reveal a clear pattern for when those statements matter most: Americans respond positively to them when they reflect their own world views. The majority of 2024 Trump voters say they would view an athlete more positively if they made statements aligned with the president’s agenda, like “We need to crack down on the crime running rampant in our cities.” On the other side, over 60 percent of Harris voters say they would think more positively about athletes who make statements like “We need to tax the richest people in this country.” That’s true even for voters on both sides who said there is “too much” politics in sports. It’s a familiar phenomenon, according to Shaun Harper, a University of Southern California professor who has researched athletes’ political activism. He described the “‘I don’t want politics in my sports unless they’re my politics’” mindset as “anti-democratic.” “It is unfair to athletes and to our democracy to expect them to only selectively leverage their platforms and their free speech rights,” he said. The most politically engaged voters are the ones who care most The strongest partisans are even more curious about what local, religious and cultural leaders have to say compared with those in the center. More than one-third of Trump voters who self-identify as “MAGA Republicans”, the president’s most loyal base, say religious institutions should make their views clear to their followers, compared to 22 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters. MAGA Trump voters are also more likely to act on those political differences: Forty-three percent say they would not buy from a business that made clear it held different political views — compared with 27 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters and roughly 30 percent across all adults. On the other side of the aisle, about one-third of self-identified “strong” Democrats say athletes should make their political views clear, double the 16 percent of those who say they are “not strong” Democrats who agree. And 36 percent of “strong” Democrats believe schools and universities should make their political views clear to their students, compared to 22 percent of “not strong” Democrats. Those who voted third party, or who didn’t vote at all, are even less eager to hear about politics in their regular life: Just 12 percent say celebrities should make their political views clear to their fans. And less than 10 percent said they’ve changed their opinion about a political topic because a celebrity spoke about it. Celebrities are already less willing to engage with partisan politics The results shed light on an ongoing debate as stars and campaign strategists try to figure out how — or even if — to engage celebrities with politics. Finding a way to do so that doesn’t damage their own careers, given the complexity of voters’ and fans’ partisan divides, can be difficult, the poll shows. When some voters claim to want neutrality but secretly want their favorite stars’ politics to match their own, but others demand political engagement, it leaves celebrities to decide which group they can upset the least. Democrats have used celebrity endorsements and surrogates in significant measure since former President Barack Obama’s star-studded 2008 presidential campaign. Harris, two years ago, saw an outpouring of support for her presidential campaign from a host of VIPs: Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland appeared at her rally in Houston, Taylor Swift posted an endorsement for the former vice president to her millions of social media followers, and Lady Gaga performed at her election-eve rally in Philadelphia. But that backfired for the celebrities when Harris lost, said Todd Hawkins, a Democratic strategist and consultant based in Los Angeles. “What we saw was the biggest backlash as a result of losing, folks saying celebrities should not tell us what to do, no one cares about what they think,” he said. Trepidation about the partisan divide is driving many celebrities’ reluctance to get involved in politics in a high-profile way — a dynamic captured by actor Jennifer Lawrence in a 2025 interview with the New York Times, when she was asked about her willingness to speak out against Trump. “I don’t really know if I should,” she said. “But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart.” Last year, actor and entrepreneur Selena Gomez posted — and later deleted — a tearful video responding to immigration crackdowns that drew criticism from the right. And Hunter Hess, an Olympic freestyle skier, drew heat from Trump for saying that representing the U.S. in the Games “brings up mixed emotions” after Alex Pretti and Renée Good were shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. “They’re very concerned, they’re scared as hell, but they were scared last year more than anything,” Hawkins said of celebrities. “I still see trepidation on how and what they will do to be engaged.” The connection between politics and pop culture, however, will hardly dissolve anytime soon, said Brown, the LA-based Democratic strategist: “There’s that phrase: the only thing Hollywood and D.C. love more than themselves are each other.” About the survey This edition of The POLITICO Poll was conducted by Public First from May 17 to 19, surveying 2,035 U.S. adults online. Results were weighted by age, race, gender, geography and educational attainment. The overall margin of sampling error is ±2.2 percentage points. Smaller subgroups have higher margins of error.

France’s national football team has become an unlikely barometer for the country’s leading far-right party, whose leaders’ shifting rhetoric about the team reflects its broader attempts at moderation — from appeals around racial identity to working-class solidarity — and helps explain why the National Rally is now seen as having a genuine shot at the presidency after decades of falling short. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the party known during his lifetime as the National Front, became perhaps the most vocal domestic antagonist of France’s football team as it emerged as an international force in the 1990s. After the country assembled a formidable squad led by nonwhite players with heritage from across its former colonial holdings, Le Pen disowned them as “fake Frenchmen who don’t sing the Marseillaise or visibly don’t know it.” “It’s a little bit artificial to bring in foreign players and baptize them ‘Equipe de France,’” Le Pen said in 1996, words he repeated even after the team won the World Cup two years later. “They put an Algerian in to please the Arabs, a Kanak who can’t even sing the national anthem, blacks to satisfy the Antillais. None of them has any place in a French team.” As Marine Le Pen prepared to succeed her father as leader of the party, she echoed his critique of the team as an example of France’s new migrants refusing to assimilate, calling the 2010 World Cup squad a collection of “ethnic, religious clans that are creating a sort of apartheid within the team itself.” “Most of these people consider themselves as representatives of France one minute, when they’re at the World Cup,” she said in a television interview at the time. “But the next, they feel like they belong to another country or have another nationality in their hearts.” As France’s governing parties weakened over the 2010s, Le Pen saw an opportunity to win support from traditional center-right constituencies. She insisted her party was “not racist,” ejected her father after he repeated statements denying the Holocaust, and rebranded the movement under a friendlier National Rally (RN) banner. Even if she was not ready to be a fan of the French national team — Le Pen conceded she “knows absolutely nothing about football” and expressed a preference for rugby — she was ready to abandon her father’s loud tradition of naysaying its successes. “It’s hard for the RN and far-right wing to be as blatantly critical of Les Bleus when the team has represented the nation well over the last decade in both their on- and off-pitch endeavors,” said Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, a sports diplomacy expert who teaches at New York University’s Robert Preston Tisch Institute for Global Sport and is author of two books on sports in France. When France won a World Cup for the second time, in 2018, Le Pen made her target not the champions themselves but politicians who latched on to the team’s successes. Emmanuel Macron, the centrist who had defeated her for the presidency a year earlier, “should focus on the policies being implemented in France, about which there is much to say, and let Les Bleus go all the way to victory,” she told an interviewer. Sporting success, added Le Pen, “won’t make worries disappear, it won’t make the dangers of insecurity and terrorism disappear, it won’t make the financial struggles disappear.” It was part of a broader redirection of far-right resentments away from race and ethnicity to class and status, embodied by the yellow-vest protests that began months after that World Cup victory. Le Pen began to speak of France’s most famous athletes the way her father once dismissed Paris’ detached elites — “technocratic robots, graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, and bourgeois bohemians,” he said in a 2006 address to a party convention — rather than as ungrateful immigrants representing the country’s restive suburbs. The populist shift was evident in 2024, when several of the team’s top strikers all joined a swift counterattack against the National Rally following its gains in regional elections. French captain Kylian Mbappé called the outcome “catastrophic” and cautioned that “the extremes are knocking at the doors of power.” “When you have the luck to have a huge salary, be a multimillionaire, the chance to travel in a private jet, I am a little annoyed to see these sports figures giving lessons to people who struggle to make ends meet,” Jordan Bardella, a Le Pen protégé then leading the National Rally, responded to Mbappé. Now Bardella and Le Pen are waiting to see who will be the party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections, a choice likely to be shaped by a looming court decision this week about Le Pen’s eligibility to run due to an embezzlement conviction. Polls show either candidate would be in a strong position to win the presidency. The two party leaders disagree on plenty of policy and political questions, but when it comes to France’s national team — now seen as favorites to again lift the World Cup trophy — Bardella and Le Pen are united in their messaging. “This tendency of actors, footballers and singers to tell the French how they should vote — particularly those earning 1,300 to 1,400 euros a month, while they themselves are millionaires or even billionaires — is starting to be very poorly received in our country,” Le Pen said after Mbappé stood by his anti-RN comments in a widely discussed Vanity Fair interview published just before the World Cup began. “Those people who are fortunate enough to live well, to be protected from insecurity, poverty and unemployment,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, should “maintain a certain reserve.”

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