Hollywood’s self-appointed Democrat kingmaker is back at it.
The man who helped push Joe Biden off the 2024 ticket has already moved on to his next project.
And George Clooney just named three Democrats he wants to see carry the party’s banner in 2028 — and the picks tell you everything about how lost the left really is.
The Venice Audition Nobody Asked For
Clooney made the declarations recently at The Future of Creativity event in Venice, according to the Daily Mail, positioning himself once again as a kind of celebrity power broker for a party still trying to figure out why voters rejected it so decisively in 2024.
His top pick is Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff.
“I think we’re all very excited by this young senator from Georgia, Jon Ossoff,” Clooney said at the event.
He also named Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as Democrats who interest him.
Clooney did say he would “absolutely not” be running himself, and added that he plans to hold off on any formal endorsement until after the fall midterm elections. He framed his enthusiasm around the idea that the party needs fresh energy. “I am 65 years old, and I think that we need some young voices that are coming up with new ideas and some new thoughts,” he said.
Fair enough. But let’s take a look at who he’s actually excited about.
Ossoff, the Innuendo Senator
Ossoff recently landed himself in a firestorm after making a remark at a campaign rally that seemed to insinuate that Trump staffer Natalie Harp was having an affair with the President — a claim made with no evidence whatsoever, according to Breitbart.
The comment blew up. White House officials demanded an apology. Ossoff tried to walk it back, insisting he had only referenced Harp as Trump’s “security blanket,” which satisfied essentially no one. The episode revealed something about Ossoff’s political instincts that voters may want to think hard about before handing him a presidential primary ballot.
And Clooney’s first pick is this guy.
JB Pritzker, meanwhile, is the governor of Illinois — a state that has climbed to the very top of the list of highest-taxed states in the nation during his two terms in office. If the Democrat Party’s problem in 2024 was that working Americans felt economically squeezed, it’s hard to understand the logic of nominating the man who turned Illinois into a cautionary tale about what happens when the government never stops finding new ways to take your money. Every dollar Pritzker’s government has extracted from Illinois families is a dollar those families couldn’t spend, save, or invest in their own futures. That’s not a record to run on nationally. That’s a warning label.
Andy Beshear of Kentucky rounds out the trio. Beshear has managed to win statewide in a deeply red state, which is a genuine political accomplishment, and some in the party see him as a potential bridge to voters Democrats have been losing for years. Whether that translates to a national primary audience — which skews considerably further left than Kentucky’s electorate — remains a separate question entirely.
The Man Who Gave Democrats Kamala Harris
It’s worth remembering what Clooney’s last major act of political influence produced.
Clooney was instrumental in convincing the Democrat Party to dump Joe Biden off the 2024 ticket. That move led directly to the anointing of Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee — a process that bypassed actual Democrat voters entirely. Harris then went on to lose the general election to Donald Trump in a historic defeat.
So the man whose advice produced that outcome is now back, from Venice, with three more names.
And here’s what the polling actually shows about those three names. According to Breitbart, Ossoff, Beshear, and Pritzker have barely cracked a number above one percent in most presidential primary polls tracking Democrat voter support for 2028. That’s not a foundation. That’s a footnote.
The broader Democrat 2028 field is dominated by figures like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — none of whom are exactly positioned to win back the working-class voters who walked away from the party in 2024. But at least those names register in polling. Clooney’s picks are essentially unknown quantities to the Democrat primary electorate that will actually decide the nomination.
But none of that seems to have slowed Clooney down. He flew to Venice, told the assembled media class which Democrats he finds promising, ruled himself out for office, and left. The party is supposed to take it from there.
What Hollywood Kingmakers Never Understand
The pattern here is worth sitting with for a moment.
Clooney pushed Biden out. Democrats got Harris. Harris lost. Now Clooney is naming three more candidates who are polling at or near one percent. And the media is covering the Venice remarks like they constitute serious political analysis rather than the preferences of a wealthy actor who spends a significant portion of his life in Italy.
The Democrat Party’s actual problem is not that it lacks candidates named by George Clooney. Its problem is that it spent years telling working Americans their concerns about inflation, border security, and government overreach were either ignorant or bigoted — and voters eventually stopped listening. No amount of celebrity endorsement fixes that.
Pritzker governs a state that taxes its citizens aggressively and has watched residents leave for lower-cost alternatives. Ossoff made national headlines by insinuating a presidential staffer was sleeping with her boss, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Beshear is a capable state-level politician whose profile has yet to translate into anything resembling national momentum.
That’s the bench Clooney is excited about.
The 2028 Democrat primary is a long way off, and the field will look very different once actual candidates begin declaring and voters start paying attention. But the spectacle of a Hollywood star holding court in Venice to tell the Democrat Party who its next presidential nominee should be — after his last round of advice ended in a historic loss — is its own kind of commentary on how the left’s donor and celebrity class still hasn’t grasped why ordinary Americans tuned them out.
The voters who sent Donald Trump back to Washington in 2024 weren’t looking for a candidate George Clooney approved of from a film festival in Italy. They were looking for someone who understood what their lives actually cost and who was willing to fight for them. That’s a very different thing. And until the Democrat Party figures that out, no amount of celebrity kingmaking is going to change the math.
Source: Breitbart, “George Clooney Makes Three Shocking Picks for Democrats He’d Back in 2028”