George Clooney has ruled out running for president himself while naming three Democrats he believes could win back the White House in 2028: Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.
The 65-year-old actor, one of the Democratic Party's most prominent donors and fundraisers, made the comments at The Future of Creativity in Venice, Italy, on Friday. "I think we're all very excited by this young senator from Georgia, Jon Ossoff," he said.
Clooney added that he also admires Pritzker and Beshear, though he stopped short of formally endorsing any single candidate, saying he would wait until after November's midterm elections.
Ossoff, 39, was first elected to represent Georgia in 2021. He became the youngest person elected to the Senate since 1980, the first senator born in the 1980s and the first millennial senator in the chamber's history.
Why Clooney says he won't run
Age was central to Clooney's reasoning, both for why he rates the three Democrats and for why he won't put himself forward. "I am 65 years old, and I think that we need some young voices that are coming up with new ideas and some new thoughts," he said, in video obtained exclusively by the Daily Mail. Asked directly if he would run, he said "absolutely not."
"I would be more than excited to support anyone but not people who are my age or older," Clooney said. "I think we need to get some younger people in."
He also pointed to his own record as a party fundraiser. "I've done it since 1988. I've been supporting and working. I was the biggest Democratic fundraiser ever," he said.
The Biden op-ed that shook the 2024 race
Clooney's remarks echoed his own history of pushing for generational change at the top of the Democratic Party. In July 2024, he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times calling on President Joe Biden, then 81, to drop out of that year's presidential race over concerns about his age.
In the piece, Clooney described a fundraiser he had hosted for Biden weeks earlier. "It's devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe 'big f***ing deal' Biden of 2010. He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020," he wrote. "He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate."
Biden ended his campaign for re-election just 11 days after the op-ed was published.
Karine Jean-Pierre's criticism
The op-ed's impact has since drawn criticism from within Biden's own White House. Former Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took aim at Clooney in a book about the 2024 election published last October, arguing that his celebrity status gave his intervention outsized weight.
"Clooney was an A-list Hollywood celebrity and a self-professed proud Democrat. His opinion was a huge deal and would draw tremendous attention from the media and the public alike," Jean-Pierre wrote.
Jean-Pierre also criticized decisions made within the Democratic Party in the run-up to Biden's withdrawal, describing the effort to push him out of the race as a betrayal. She wrote that Clooney's op-ed "may not have been a calculated jab at the party's campaign to push out the president, but the letter lent a renewed velocity to the effort."
"After its publication, more and more party leaders said Biden had to go," she wrote, adding that "though his concerns weren't completely unjustified, his assessment didn't offer the full context."
What Jean-Pierre said about the fundraiser
Jean-Pierre, who attended the fundraiser Clooney referenced in his op-ed, offered her own account of Biden's appearance that night. "We went through nine time zones. I was tired, and I'm decades younger than Biden, so it was understandable that he might not have been sprinting across a ballroom or at his most electric when addressing the star-studded crowd," she wrote.
Clooney has not said when he will make a formal endorsement for 2028, saying only that he will hold off until after the November midterms.
