US television host and producer Oprah Winfrey speaks on the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
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MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
The NPR Network will be reporting live from Chicago throughout the week bringing you the latest on the Democratic National Convention.
Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul and influential talk show host, gave a thunderous speech endorsing the Harris-Walz campaign on Wednesday night.
“We’re now so fired up, we can’t wait to leave here and do something, and what we’re gonna do is elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States,” she said.
In the past, Winfrey has used political and social capital to influence public opinion — a phenomenon aptly coined as the “Oprah effect” — to throw her weight behind Democratic candidates in critical elections.
In endorsing President Biden and Harris in 2020, Winfrey emphasized the gravity of Harris being on the Democratic presidential ticket as a woman of color.
“I was thinking the other day, ‘I wish Maya [Angelou] were alive to see it,'” Winfrey told People Magazine in 2020. “But maybe she’s working it on the other side. Because there’s no way to measure what the election of Kamala Harris means for all women, all colors, everywhere.”
Before 2007, Winfrey had never publicly endorsed a political candidate. But when she backed former President Barack Obama over former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, the endorsement had an outsized impact on the election: Researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the University of Maryland found that Winfrey’s endorsement ultimately was worth about 1 million votes for Obama.
Winfrey went on to support Clinton in 2016 and President Biden in 2020. Notably, she also endorsed Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in the 2022 midterms over Mehmet Oz — who started The Dr. Oz Show with the help of Winfrey and her production company, Harpo Productions.
Winfrey has also advocated for protecting voting access for Black women, and founded OWN Your Vote under the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2020 to fight voter suppression across the country.
Watch Winfrey’s full remarks:
