When Jon Ossoff came to Los Angeles last month to fundraise, the Senator from Georgia’s campaign set some rather unusual rules. Attendees at fundraisers in Beverly Hills and Hancock Park were asked not to post photos on social media and when local media outlets caught wind that the 39-year old Senator was in LA, surrogates asked reporters if they would consider downplaying what he was in town for. 

It wasn’t that long ago that Hollywood fundraisers were big-ticket events generating huge amounts of coverage, not dissimilar to awards shows.

When George Clooney hosted a $40,000-per-plate event for then President Barack Obama in 2012 every major news outlet covered it. Nowadays, when candidates like Ossoff come to town, the message seems to be: I’m happy to take money from Hollywood as long as my constituents back home don’t find out about it. 

In the wake of this week’s historic blue wave which will sweep Democrats back in control of both chambers of Congress, Hollywood’s donor and activist community is coming to terms with its new, far more marginalized role in national politics.

A number of candidates rolled through town including Texas’ James Talarico, New Hampshire’s Chris Pappas, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown Alaska’s Mary Peltola and Michigan gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, but events were more intimate and did not generate much notice or coverage, which was by design.

“It was a repudiation of Hollywood,” said an LA-based political consultant who noted that not a single A-list celebrity was deployed to any of the major battleground states during these midterms nor were any big donors out on any soapbox — a departure from recent elections.

That the Democrats were so successful suggests that a muzzled Hollywood may be the best path forward for the party. “It’s not the death of celebrity activism, but the Democrats learned a lesson over the last several years: Hollywood is not the end-all-be-all.”

Celebrity activism has long been a double-edged sword, even more so in recent decades as Republicans have focused on painting the Democrats as out of touch coastal elites. Hollywood’s political machine was also deeply damaged in the wake of Joe Biden‘s disastrous 2024 re-election campaign.

Biden dropped out of the race in July, just months before the election, as questions swirled about his mental acuity.

The co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign was former Disney and Dreamworks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and many in the industry were left feeling burned, prompting many donors to pull back.

“I think that era of [legendary agent] Lew Wasserman and more recently of Jeffrey Katzenberg — who thought he was the new Lew Wasserman—that’s gone,” said an executive active in the industry’s fundraising scene. “There is no machine anointing this person or that person. The community understood its place and that it isn’t as important as it used to be. It seemed more organic (in this cycle).”

Ironically, the titans of Silicon Valley may need to learn a similar lesson…

At Trump’s inauguration a number of top executives were present including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai, showing a level of fealty. Now that the Democrats are back in control of Congress, some are questioning whether their commitment to Trump’s first two years in office was wise.