Martha Stewart gives subtle presidential endorsement

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After staying silent during the 2020 presidential election, Martha Stewart has announced that she will be voting for Kamala Harris in November.

While speaking to Joanna Coles of 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 Trump, Harris “doesn’t hate New York” and “doesn’t hate democracy.”

Stewart endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, but in a 2020 interview with The New York Times spoke about her desire to remain neutral for the good of her magazine, Martha Stewart Living. “In terms of being the owner of the magazine,” she asked the outlet, “how do you take sides when 50 percent of your readers might be on one side, and 50 percent on the other?”

Stewart did share that she would be voting for Harris, but declined to say much more on the subject. “I can’t post anything about politics because first of all, the eyeballs of a parent company come and [I’ll] get a 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 series The Apprentice.

Per CNN, Stewart believed that she was going to “fire” Trump on air and take over as the only host of the show, but Trump decided to continue hosting. The businessman published an open letter in which he said Stewart “made this firing up,” and that her “performance was terrible in that the show lacked mood, temperament and just about everything a show needs for success.”

Stewart did not return for future seasons of The Apprentice, but when he won the election in 2016, she told the Chicago Tribune that she wished the Trump family well.

Stewart told Coles that she planned to “keep quiet” about her political opinions beyond her subtle endorsement of Harris.