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After remaining silent during the 2020 presidential election, Martha Stewart has announced that she will be voting for Kamala Harris in November.
When I spoke to Joanna Coles from The Daily Beast at the 2024 Retail Influencer CEO Forum on Tuesday, September 10, the 83-year-old businesswoman and lifestyle icon said that unlike her opponent Donald TrumpHarris “doesn’t hate New York” and “doesn’t hate democracy.”
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Stewart endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, but in a 2020 interview with New York Times spoke of her desire to remain neutral for the good of her paper, Martha Stewart Living. “As far as owning the paper,” she asked the outlet, “how do you take sides when 50 percent of your readers can be on one side and 50 percent on the other?”
Stewart said she would vote for Harris, but declined to say much more on the subject. “I can’t write anything about politics because first of all the eyeballs come from a parent company and [I’ll] call right away,” she told Coles, the 62-year-old publishing executive.
Trump and Stewart were rivals in 2006, when they both hosted versions of reality shows The Apprentice.
Per CNNStewart believed she would “fire” Trump on air and take over as the sole host of the show, but Trump decided to continue hosting. The businessman published an open letter saying that Stewart “made this up” and that her “performance was terrible because the show lacked humor, temperament and just about everything a show needs to succeed.”
Stewart did not return for future seasons of The Apprenticebut when he won the election in 2016, she told Chicago Tribune that she wished the Trump family well.
Stewart told Coles that she planned to “keep quiet” about her political views beyond her subtle support for Harris.