dictates republican leah poo vukmir in wisconsin. c-span, your primary source for campaign 2018. look at the impact of celebrities in the 2018 campaign, including rapper kanye west's visit to the white house on thursday. this is from washington journal. phone now by ted johnson covered this meeting with kanye west and the president yesterday. what was the original reason for kanye west to come to the white house yesterday? ted: the stated reason from sir host: what was the reason for kanye west to come to the white house?

sarah huckabee sanders and said it was to talk about criminal justice reform, but as you saw from the meeting, kanye west went off on a lot of different topics. : kid rock was there, the beach boys were there, what were some of these other meetings about yesterday? : right before the meeting with kanye west, there was a book signing ceremony for the music -- there was a bill signing legislation for the music modernization act. this is legislation about licensing and royalty reform to streamline that process. it gets incredibly technical, but this has been a long-desired legislative achievement for the music industry and they finally got it, and trump happened to be the president to sign it, so naturally, the question was who was going to sign up for the signing ceremony. they managed to get together this group of artist that --

artists that included kid rock, -- and theynd based thought kanye west might be there for the signing ceremony. host: plenty of activists over the past two weeks, coming off the protests over the brett kavanaugh nomination to the supreme court, we saw taylor swift get involved in promoting a candidate in the tennessee senate race. kanye west, kid rock, when it comes to the november election, what celebrity appearances do you think will have the most impact? ted: the only celebrity appearance that we actually have seems to be taylor swift. of put out this endorsement two tennessee candidates on instagram, and urged people to register to vote. and within 24 hours there was a spike in voter registration. i think there is probably a good

chance that there is a correlation right there. overall to comes celebrity endorsements or celebrity activism, i think people certainly pay attention. the tougher thing to prove his whether they actually take action. whether af skeptical, celebrity that says vote for this candidate, or whether a celebrity says, take this action, actually has a huge impact. and one of the reasons is, especially for younger voters and younger activists, they are with messages these days. and i think a lot of things just get lost in the shuffle. there is so much coming at you that i question whether the impact is as great as maybe it was 10 years ago, when we saw for example oprah winfrey endorsed president obama. that seemed to have a big impact

on his campaign, especially in iowa. david drucker is a reporter with the d.c. examiner. he tweeted yesterday, asking in support of celebrity entertainers is a bipartisan exercise politicians of both parties practiced for years. when can it backfire? it can backfire when a celebrity gets out there and , kind talking and a real of crazy way and says things that are a little outrageous, or embarrasses the candidate, says profanity. we saw some of that with kanye west, or in the case of robert tonyo, he went out at the awards and delivered an f-bomb about president trump. the response from the republican

national committee is that they actually put together a video of different celebrities saying outrageous things about president trump, and they collected all together. and the whole title of the video was unhinged. and to see republicans -- and expect to see republicans attacked democrats a lot more for their celebrity support. and i think that is driven by the fact that hollywood leans left and republicans are looking for any opportunity to brand democrats as out of touch and part of the coastal elite. but there is a little hypocrisy in that, and that is that republicans will jump at any chance to embrace any celebrity that likes them, that endorses them, and that is what we saw with donald trump and kanye west. host: when we talk about hollywood leading up to previous election cycles, it's usually about the money being donated to campaigns, two different

committees. compared tos cycle the last cycle when it comes to money coming out of hollywood for democrats and republicans and their campaigns? ted: i just looked at the figures in the breakdown is about the same. -- this is according to the center for responsible politics. the money's going to democrats. 20% of the money is going to republicans. a few percentage points just slightly different for democrats this cycle during -- this cycle. and as far as the total amount of money, i think we are looking candidatesums to all , coming out of hollywood this cycle compared to past midterm elections, which speaks to the level of activism that is actually out there. have theve me, i don't exact figure at my fingertips right now, but this is coming

--m open secrets.org opensecrets.org, which is the group that goes contribution by contribution and puts them into these different classifications. it's quite good. next 25 days, what is one or two political action committees connected to hollywood that viewers should watch that might have an impact? ted: there is a group called swing left that is doing a lot of work, especially in california congressional districts. and they are rounding up a lot of celebrities to do get out the vote efforts. they are strictly focused on using celebrities to get people to volunteer the weekend before the midterm elections. they did a lot of work right in advance of the california primary, and that seemed to help a lot.

there was a lot of concern about democrats getting shut out of the primary, so i think that is one group i am keeping an i on on, but i haveye to tell you there are so many celebrity videos, we saw a lot of that in 2016. in 2018, there is a lot of feeling that things are going to be different this time around, that they are more savvy about making these videos and how they are deploying celebrities. editored johnson, senior for variety, i appreciate your time this morning. ted: thank you. >> c-span's washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. saturday morning, foreign policy senior diplomatic reporter colin lynch discusses the fallout over the disappearance of saudi journalist jamaal care shall be -- jamal khashoggi.

also, the business climate in estates and how they rank. contributeher jones discusses her recent article examining the government's student loan forgiveness program. watched c-span's washington journal live at 7:00 eastern saturday morning. 7:00the discussion -- eastern sunday morning. join the discussion. democratic, congressman joe crowley of new york, gene green of texas, and republican senator jeff flake of arizona discuss their accomplishments in congress. >> as a country, the passage of veryffordable care act working closely with the obama administration, working to get that bill forward and getting the votes to pass it. it is one of the greatest accomplishments of my career in for millions of

people who had no insurance, who today have it. that has a district probably huge numbers of immigrants. some of the things the president has done is against what i think our country ought to be doing. people ought to, the dreamer act, these are people who were brought here when they were commit anyou can't offense when you are a baby or a child, so we should be more inclusive. america is an immigrant country. steve: it's a tough time to be here -- >> it's a tough time to be here. i never did warm to the president, as he campaigned or governed. not only have to embrace the president, you have to embrace all of his politics and his behavior in order to get through a republican primary. and that was never in the cards for me. i just couldn't do it. us for conversations

with retiring members of congress saturday starting at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span, c-span.org or listen with the free c-span radio app. >> next, discussion about the emerging digital economy, broadband access in rural areas. eventrookings institution is one hour and 10 minutes. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> good morning, everybody. we apologize for the delay. suspicious an security vehicle by the white house, which caused a little bit of a delay. but he is here. he braved the yellow tape out there. my name is dr. nicol