Should Stephen A. Smith Run for President?
Quite frankly… I don’t know
It feels like a million years ago now, but there was a time, when Donald Trump first announced his campaign for president nearly ten years ago, when everyone assumed he was joking. It was obviously a ploy for attention, a way to juice the sagging ratings for The Apprentice and get his name back in the mainstream media. The Huffington Post included coverage of his campaign in the “Entertainment” section instead of the “Politics” section of the website. When then-Rep. Keith Ellison suggested on ABC that Democrats should prepare to face Trump in the general election, the panel literally laughed in his face:
So it would be a mistake to dismiss the viability of other celebrity candidates just because they seem unserious, and it is in this spirit that we ought to discuss the potential candidacy of the nation’s most prominent sports pundit, Stephen A. Smith.
I’m not sure who first floated the idea of Smith running for president, or if that person was serious, but for the last few weeks at least SOME people are taking it seriously. There’s a Twitter account and memes devoted to it, and some pollsters have started including him in lists of potential 2028 candidates. Smith himself has been talking up the idea, somewhat playfully and somewhat seriously, insisting that “They need to cleanse the Democratic Party as we know it.” Indeed, it seems to reflect the sorry state of the Democratic Party that people are taking seriously the idea of nominating a TV host who has never run for office before and isn’t even a registered member of the party… but, you know, it’s happened before.
Personally, my attitude towards Stephen A. Smith isn’t all that different from my feelings about the Democratic Party: Not exactly a fan, but forced by circumstances beyond my control to pay an unhealthy amount of attention to what’s going on over there. As such, I feel equipped to explain this phenomenon to those not well-versed in Smith’s lore; more importantly, I feel like the flirtation with a Smith candidacy, as silly as it may seem, says a lot about the current state of electoral politics and the anti-Trump coalition in America.
Who Is Stephen A.?
How to even begin explaining Stephen A. Smith’s role to someone unfamiliar with him? It’s like trying to explain the sun to someone who has only seen shadows before…
Smith grew up in Hollis, Queens, and began his career as a sportswriter in Philadelphia in the 1990s. In the mid-2000s he started as a radio host and briefly had an ESPN show called Quite Frankly (the promos for which still rattle around my brain).
But he really took off in 2012, when he began appearing on ESPN’s morning show, First Take, alongside Skip Bayless. Smith and Bayless would debate truly anything, in a way that almost seemed to satirize the concept of sports debates. In 2016, Bayless left ESPN for Fox Sports, but Smith remained, and started occupying more and more of ESPN’s programming slate.
He is now on TV virtually every waking minute of the day, arguing with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo or bickering with Molly Qerim or just monologing about nearly anything. It often feels like ESPN is simply “the Stephen A. Smith channel.” Even if he is not there, his style of debating — bombastic and overbearing, passionate and theatrical — is present throughout all of sports media. The Presidential chatter in some ways feels like a result of the boredom Smith must feel after conquering the sports television. (He recently signed a new $100 million contract with ESPN.)
OK, But Who IS Stephen A.?
Of course, those are just facts. To really understand Smith’s essence, we have to revisit a pair of famous tweets about him. First, there is this one:
This is a great joke about the nature of the Smith/Bayless debates that helped launch his fame. But I think it sort of misstates Smith’s whole deal. It suggests that what makes him special are his Crazy Takes, but that’s not really true. It was always Bayless who was more likely to take absurd positions, like saying that Johnny Manziel would be bigger in Cleveland than LeBron or that Andrew Bynum was better than Dwight Howard.
Stephen A. Smith’s opinions are usually much more reasonable than that on the substance. Often, when you boil a Stephen A. Smith rant down to its essence, he’s saying something completely unobjectionable like, “LeBron James1 is very good at basketball” or “Sometimes teams lose despite playing very well.” But the WAY he says it is never that simple or banal. The passion and verbosity that Smith is able to generate, seemingly on command, is what sets him apart.
He can do this about anything, whether it’s sports or Pokémon. Last year, a prank caller tried to stump him with a question about the movie Cars and he immediately rebutted him with the same precision and intensity with which he talks about the New York Knicks. Which is why the tweet that real Stephen A. fans always return to is this one from David Roth in 2012:
This is who Smith is. He does not say, “I don’t like that” or “I disagree”; he says, “To me, that’s preposterous.” He does not say, “those things” or “stuff like that”; he says “things of that nature.” Most importantly, he does not just listen to the specials; he HAS AN OPINION about them. That is the Stephen A. Smith experience.
What Does Any of This Have To Do with Running for President?
The buzz around Smith running for president seems to have really started last fall, when he went on Sean Hannity’s show to make the case for Kamala Harris’ campaign. At a moment when most Democrats were paralyzed by nervousness about the impending election, and when the actual Harris campaign was running an uninspiring campaign with a confused media strategy, Smith made a rare forceful defense of the Vice President.
It wasn’t just that Smith defended Harris; it was that he seemed to do so passionately and eagerly, at a time when nobody seemed particularly passionate about Harris, or eager to defend her. If you listen to the substance of what Smith said, it wasn’t all that original. As with most defenses of Harris, it was barely even persuasive, amounting to, essentially: She’s not as dishonest as Trump. Most of the problems of the Biden Administration were not her fault. She will likely pursue a nonthreatening, middle-of-the-road policy agenda that should not scare off most voters.
But the WAY he said it was both emphatic and entertaining. Remember: This is what Smith does. He takes anodyne positions and argues them with incomparable passion and enthusiasm. He turns the argument into a performance. For example, in the most shared clip from the interview, Smith reacts to Hannity’s criticism of Harris’ communication style:
“I know you're not talking about someone being lucid and cogent and enunciating their thoughts with clarity and you’re bragging about Donald Trump. We can’t be watching the same stuff if that's what you’re doing!”
This is a pretty standard answer, but beyond just the words Smith used, it was the way his body and voice vibrated with anger at the suggestion that Harris was less articulate or knowledgeable than Donald Trump. And at the same time, Smith remained articulate and, crucially, seemed to be having fun, making this face just seconds later:
The image of a Democratic surrogate happily and enthusiastically making the case for their candidate shouldn’t be all that surprising, but it was. Over the last decade or so, the Democratic Party has gradually retreated from making actual arguments. None of the party’s last three presidential nominees has been particularly good at going on TV and defending a specific vision on how they want to govern. And it’s not just the nominees: The party as a whole struggles to articulate a concrete agenda in a way that makes sense to voters. Instead, they have tried to run on things like competence and normalcy and the implied contrast with Donald Trump.
But Stephen A. Smith represents something different. This man is nothing but arguments. Going on TV and passionately defending the things he believes is literally all he does. The idea of a Stephen A. candidacy may not be very serious or substantial, but this is the crux of its appeal. When Jay Caspian Kang made the case for Smith in The New Yorker, he cited Smith’s “willingness to always be onscreen, his theatrical fights, and a profound understanding of how the Internet was changing traditional media.” In other words, many Democratic voters have a genuine longing for a candidate, ANY candidate, who can make engage the media with a forceful case for their policy agenda.
And What Would That Agenda Be, Exactly?
This is where things get a little tricky. Stephen A. Smith is, at least officially, an independent, and the policies he supports reflect what non-politicians usually mean when they say they’re independents: He seems to have a semi-incoherent mix of left-wing and right-wing views. He expressed enthusiasm for Senator Bernie Sanders (in 2009!), but expresses similar enthusiasm for Candace Owen now. He claims to support universal health care, but also doesn’t want to raise taxes. In recent weeks, he has participated in the ritualistic round of bashing trans athletes that has consumed much of the center-left.
In other words, Smith has Dumb Rich Guy politics. He cares less about specific policies than the general appearance of independence and moderation. He encourages politicians to “compromise” and prides himself on having friends of all political leanings (like Sean Hannity). What politicians he is drawn to depends mostly on a personal preference for their style and bravado.
To be clear, I am not really criticizing him for approaching politics this way. It is similar to how a lot of people think about politics. But it makes it very difficult to know how he would govern, or what would animate his candidacy… and I suspect that’s ALSO a big part of his appeal.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, many Democrats and other pundits have come to the conclusion that Kamala Harris lost because of unpopular positions she took in the 2020 primary. The theory is that her inability to distance herself from those views in 2024 led voters to conclude she was too “far left,” and that led them to support Donald Trump. Therefore, the idea of nominating a candidate who HAS NO prior views he has to distance himself from seems awfully appealing.
And while I do not buy this explanation for Harris’ loss, it’s not a crazy idea. There was a time when I thought THIS would be the major legacy of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign: that parties would learn the value of nominating a famous rich guy with no prior political experience. I think people generally overrate how much of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was based on his extremist views, and underrate how much was due to the fact that he was a very famous guy who was unsullied by associations with prior Republican policies, like the Iraq war or attempts to cut Social Security.
Smith could potentially be that for Democrats: a chance at a clean slate with voters. The fact that he has no firm policy views, and has previously been an independent, would allow him to take whatever positions are politically expedient without coming across to voters as dishonest. Smith could present his lack of ideology as pragmatism, allowing him to perfectly appeal to the median voter. And in this way, Smith is the perfect candidate for the consultant class as well. After all, isn’t their ideal candidate someone who can go on TV and theatrically defend whatever position voters already support?
I Don’t Know, Man… Shouldn't Politicians, Like, Stand for Stuff?
I think so! As a socialist, I think principles and a commitment to a political movement are important things.
But most Democrats emphatically disagree. To them, that’s preposterous. At this point, they have basically no coherent agenda, and resist any attempt to pin one on them. Over the last few decades, as the Democratic Party gradually shed its working class base and as union density has plummeted throughout the country, the party has retreated from the New Deal/Great Society programs that defined its agenda for most of the twentieth century.
In its place, what the Democratic Party has become is the party of experience and stability.2 It’s not a coincidence that, since 2016, they have nominated candidates like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris for president. The case for these candidates was obviously NOT based on anything they believed or stood for — it’s debatable whether they ever believed in or stood for anything at all. As a result, they were unpersuasive and often laughably inarticulate in making an affirmative case for what they believe in.
Enter Stephen A. Smith. As mentioned, there is perhaps nobody on Earth better at summoning passion for an argument on command. He can do it at the drop of a hat — or the recitation of a P.F. Chang’s menu. The substance of the argument is secondary, which is entirely appropriate for the Democratic Party, which seems allergic to substance.
In other words, the attraction of Smith as a candidate seems to represent a modicum of growth on the part of some Democrats. They now recognize that leaning on experience and the promise of stability is not enough for most voters. You need to make an actual case to voters in the middle, and so why not go out and find the best TV-argument guy you can find?
On the other hand, Smith’s appeal reflects a familiar and disappointing indifference to the actual message itself. Stephen A. Smith is style over substance. That is, in fact, part of his charm when it comes to sports arguments, which can get stale after a while and are ultimately secondary to the actual games. But with politics, the arguments matter because they have real world effects. I don’t think a political party can succeed, at least in the long-term, by just dialing the Argument Machine all the way up to Stephen A. Smith levels. Ultimately, you need to stand for something, and quite frankly, until this country has a left-wing party that is willing to stand for something, I’m not sure what hope we have.
Although things between Smith and LeBron are a bit tense at the moment…
Democrats do have SOME identity on social issues, as the generally pro-choice, pro-LGBT, anti-gun party, but they have never really LED on these issues (gay marriage was legalized by the Courts, and the Party didn’t include it in its platform until it was already supported by a majority of Americans). And the party’s recent retreat on trans issues shows how quickly they give these positions up when they are seen as a slight electoral liability. Certainly they have never nominated a particularly forceful advocate for any of these positions…