lins and his team to sniff how Ossoff is more interested in Hollywood, California, than Hollywood, Georgia (a tiny unincorporated place in the northeast corner of the state, if you're curious).

And conservative redoubts like The Washington Free Beacon and Fox   Friends have dragged Ossoff because he spent $900 on a makeup session with Stephanie Ponder, who worked on The Notebook and The Hunger Games.  On the campaign trail, however, Ossoff presents himself less as a polished pretty boy and more as a populist fighter for the working class,  the Beacon sneered in breaking Revlongate, while on Fox   Friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy snarked,  I don't see that they're doing anything amazing to his face. I mean, I'll do it for $900 a pop. I mean, did you see that?  Campos-Duffy, it should be noted, got her start on The Real World: San Francisco.

The anti-Hollywood attacks are perhaps one reason Abdul El-Sayed, the fiercely progressive Democrat vying to win a Senate seat in Michigan, has pointedly stayed away from many entertainment biz associations, though Republicans tried to make hay of a fundraiser with Jeffrey Soros, George's nephew, as a  movie producer.  (Soros has what might be generously called a thin Hollywood résumé; perhaps his best-known credit is the minor Sundance hit Magazine Dreams.) After the event, the spokesperson for opponent Mike Rogers chose to mainly knock El-Sayed for his  dark Soros money.  Sometimes you just gotta play the hits.

All this Hollywood bashing feels a little odd coming from a party whose leader rode 14 seasons of reality show fame to the White House. Never mind, also, that this midterm cycle, Republicans hope to elect Minnesota's first GOP senator in more than two decades: former Sunday Night Football sideline reporter Michele Tafoya, who made her name by appearing on the highest-rated show on television for more than 10 years. (Opponent Peggy Flanagan has been seeking to weaponize something else - Tafoya's comments a few years ago that she'd like to move to Florida and become a  future former Minnesotan. ) The point is that Republicans think Hollywood's Q rating is so low that bashing a candidate with such associations can help them.

They seem to have missed the memo, though, that Big Tech has largely replaced Hollywood as the glam villain that citizens might actually vote against. In Wisconsin, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany has shrewdly gone after Democratic opponent David Crowley as  Data Center David  for his perceived support of such projects. Polls have the candidates even, so it could be working. Meanwhile, Ossoff remains seven points ahead of Collins despite the supposedly toxic association with Grey's Anatomy and Young Sheldon.

Middle America Republicans haven't been entirely unwilling to stay off the celebrity train themselves. Witness Tennessee, where Sen. Marsha Blackburn, in her bid for governor, just reposted an AI video of herself singing and dancing to Kendrick Lamar's  Not Like Us  at the 2025 Super Bowl. The veteran Republican actually has voted for deepfake protections and also does not exactly have the strongest civil rights record, having not supported the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or critical race theory in classrooms.

All of that makes a synthetic video for a song about Black disenfranchisement a cringe look, and Dems and even Republicans quickly got to mocking the post, which Blackburn accompanied with the words,  Tomorrow. Ready to roll.  Given some of the bait Republicans are taking, Rickrolled might have been the more apt meme.

This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.