A Kamala Harris Celebrity Whisperer Reveals Campaign’s Strategy for Harnessing Star Power
It is July 31, 10 days since Joe Biden announced he was stepping down from the presidential race and throwing his support behind Kamala Harris, and Greg Propper is on his phone, nodding and smiling, taking one of what has been a deluge of calls. “That would be amazing!” he says, mouthing “I’m so sorry” to the reporter he’s talking to on Zoom.
As soon as he hangs up, the phone rings again. It’s been like this for days.
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Biden’s campaign hired Propper’s L.A.-based social impact firm Propper Daley to help with celebrity surrogacy in early 2024, and the switch to Harris has meant “a whirlwind!” Propper says. When Biden was the nominee, “folks were certainly willing to step up and to engage when we asked them to,” Propper explains. “Now, everybody is proactively raising their hands and saying they want to be involved. Sometimes it can be tempting to say yes to every single person that wants to help. Our job on the campaign is to make sure that we have a strategy.”
Propper is helping the campaign tactically deploy celebrities who have raised their hands. For instance, designer Bobby Berk, of Queer Eye fame, who grew up in the middle of Missouri’s Amish farm country, has been involved in Rural Americans for Harris, while Jane Fonda has been speaking to senior voters.
Propper, a self-described “pragmatic idealist,” has built a career helping artists like John Legend, Kerry Washington and Camila Cabello turn their good intentions into concrete social action work. With Legend, his firm helped organize formerly incarcerated people as voters, and with Cabello, they raised a litigation fund to challenge “anti-gay” laws in her home state of Florida. Propper Daley also advises brands like Best Buy and Babylist and helps nonprofits like Everytown for Gun Safety and Hillary Clinton’s childhood health initiative, Too Small to Fail. And the company hosts an annual event, A Day of Unreasonable Conversation, which convenes some 600 Hollywood writers and executives to hear from activists, policy wonks and politically active stars about how to incorporate issues of the moment into storylines. Speakers over the years have included Washington, Jill Biden, Kim Kardashian, Ezra Klein, Stacey Abrams and Halle Berry.
Helping Hollywood learn not just when to speak up but when to listen requires a special kind of finesse. And Propper seems to have acquired some of that diplomacy growing up in Rye, New York, watching his dad, who worked in retail, run for City Council and help found Rye’s Human Rights Commission. For a Boy Scouts project, together they mapped out the handicapped parking spaces in town and put notes on cars that were illegally parked.
“I watched my dad be socially entrepreneurial and not wait for somebody else to solve problems,” Propper says. In part inspired by a love of The West Wing, Propper got a political science degree at Tufts and a law degree at Cardozo, worked congressional internships and helped guide a campaign called Service Nation to expand national service programs like Teach for America and the Peace Corps. While on Service Nation, he met CAA’s Michelle Kydd Lee, who at the time was running the agency’s philanthropic arm, and he began to see a need for someone to help the entertainment community and the policy and nonprofit worlds connect.
Propper co-founded Propper Daley in 2012, with Legend and Chrissy Teigen among the company’s first clients, focusing on issues like criminal justice reform. (THR highlighted Propper on our Next Gen list the next year.) Propper Daley’s relationships, Legend recalls, helped the couple “navigate the difficult work of making change in an area that can be fraught and controversial. I trust them implicitly.”
During the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Legend will be headlining a party thrown by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and the singer today advocates regularly on behalf of the Democratic Party to talk specifically about criminal justice. Washington started working with Propper Daley in 2018; two years later, she was hosting a night of 2020’s DNC, which took place on Zoom. This year, she will host the DNC on Thursday night, when Harris formally accepts the nomination. “This isn’t just about candidates and election cycles,” Washington says. “It’s about building a future where everyone understands their voice and their power within our democracy.”
Clinton relied on him to help connect her with TV showrunners to spread the word on childhood health to parents, and she calls Propper’s team “instrumental to leveraging the power of popular media.” And Cabello calls Propper, “one of the smartest minds and biggest hearts I’ve ever met.”
Deploying surrogates for the presidential campaign, Propper says, involves connecting people with the right issue and the right community. “Just because someone is a fan of your work, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily will listen to you when it comes time to vote,” Propper says. “For that to be true, they really have to trust that you have done the work to educate yourself and that you have some level of permission to be able to talk about the candidate or the topic.”
Propper is maddeningly mum on whether two of pop culture’s most influential figures, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, will come out for Harris. But he’s clear that the campaign is being tactical about how it unleashes support. After Biden’s announcement that he was stepping down, “what we saw happen over the next 48 hours was that folks in the entertainment and creative community felt really energized by Harris’ candidacy,” Propper says.
But the campaign is aware that it needs to stretch that enthusiasm out up until November and keep stars from stealing the focus and playing into Republican accusations of elitism. “This is not going to be a celebrity-driven campaign,” Propper says. “It’s going to be a people-driven campaign. The vice president wants to make sure it includes everybody.”
This story first appeared in the August 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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