Could ‘Real Housewives’ Elect a President?

There is an almost infinite number of topics people fight about on Bravo shows — stemware choices, mortgage fraud, Kanye’s penis. But one subject that is usually considered off-limits even by the cable network’s bare-it-all stars is politics. 

That may be changing, at least offscreen. This presidential election, Nelini Stamp, the creator of Real Housewives of Politics, is trying to harness the community of Bravo fans to help spur voter turnout and engagement. “Movements have to meet people where they’re at,” says Stamp, director of strategy at the Working Families Party, who created Real Housewives of Politics in 2022 after finding a sense of community among Bravo watchers online during the pandemic. “People are already organized with Housewives. It’s not a church, but it’s like a gathering.”

Upcoming Real Housewives of Politics events include a Housewives-themed drag brunch in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 25, which will be attended by both actual Housewives and drag queens impersonating them. Throughout the fall, the group will hold watch parties in different cities timed to Bravo’s programming schedule. “We ask people to get out the vote, we talk about issues, and we watch the shows,” Stamp says. She also runs the Real Housewives of Politics Instagram account, which deploys Bravo memes as political commentary, such as gifs of stunned housewives when President Biden withdrew his candidacy and clips of crying arguments in a post about Project 2025.

Kamala Harris‘s presidential campaign is not affiliated with Real Housewives of Politics, but Stamp’s use of Bravo content to engage potential voters reflects the way the Democratic presidential nominee and her staff have embraced memes and pop culture, from adopting the green hue of Charli XCX’s Brat album cover on the Kamala HQ Instagram account to sending a video to a Simpsons panel at Comic-Con.

Stamp sees Bravo’s audience as a community ripe for organizing, with its engaged, predominantly female fan base. The network itself, however, is not involved. “We try to steer clear of politics because people hate that,” Bravo and Real Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen told The Hollywood Reporter in May. “They come to us for an escape. We have Housewives in red states and blue states. And a lot of blue-state fans get really riled up over Housewives who are Trump supporters. But you know, get over it, this is America.”

Over the years, there have been a few exceptions to the idea that Bravo is a politics-free space, as when Lisa Rinna and Camille Grammer debated Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation in season nine of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or when Real Housewives of Orange County‘s Vicky Gunvalson and Real Housewives of New York‘s Dorinda Medley had a drunken argument about COVID-19 vaccines during the second season of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip. 

Politics enters the Bravoverse in subtler ways too. During the 10th season of the cable network’s Atlanta-based reality show Married to Medicine, Simone Whitmore, an OB/GYN on the cast, talked to a patient about how she would have to leave Georgia if she ended up needing to terminate her high-risk pregnancy because of the state’s fetal heartbeat law. And Real Housewives of Potomac‘s Gizelle Bryant expressed reservations about sending her daughter to college in Florida, remarking, “the way the governor down there is acting like a fool.” 

“I don’t watch Bravo for people to be political,” Stamp says, “But politics is not just about the two-party system. Politics is also what you live up against. So when Gizelle said she’s worried about sending her daughter to Florida, Black women understood what that meant. That is political to me. These are women at the end of the day and women’s rights specifically now are being attacked.” Stamp envisions, say, a future Housewives season in which the Project 2025 plank to get rid of no-fault divorce has been successful. “If all these Housewives can’t get a divorce, what is the show going to be about?”

While Cohen may not be overtly political, as the host of Watch What Happens Live, he is the only LGBTQ host in late night, and he holds a kind of symbolic status as America’s best gay friend, a meaningful role during an election where some Americans see LGBTQ rights as on the ballot.

Harris, meanwhile, came into the campaign with real Bravo bona fides — she is the only major presidential candidate ever to appear on Watch What Happens Live, which she did in 2020 before Biden named her as his running mate. And she even dropped her own version of a Real Housewives tagline during the appearance. “I’ll give you my opinion,” Harris said on the episode, a clip of which Bravo recently reshared on the WHHL TikTok account. “But my beliefs are never up for debate.”