Conan O’Brien is putting his comic persona behind some of the most overlooked—and consequential—races on the ballot.
The late-night legend is the face of a new fundraising campaign for the State + Local Election Alliance, a political action committee that puts money into low-profile state and local races involving the officials who oversee elections.
“If anyone appreciates something unsexy, it’s this guy right here,” O’Brien says in one of two minute-long social media spots screened by LateNighter. “So when I heard there’s a group that only backs the unsexy races—county clerks, election boards, local courts—I thought, ‘Finally, my people.’”
“These are the offices that decide whether your vote gets cast, counted, and certified,” he adds.
In another spot, O’Brien pokes fun at the idea that anyone would turn to him for guidance on politics.
“‘I must have Conan’s political advice’ is a thought that has never crossed your mind, and it shouldn’t have,” he says. “Yet here we are, ’cause I just learned something smart, and I want to share it.”
In both videos, O’Brien notes that donations can have an outsized impact in races that attract relatively little money or attention.
The State + Local Election Alliance, or SLEA, is an FEC-registered hybrid PAC focused on state and local races that can affect how elections are administered. Though it is not formally affiliated with a political party, its work is Democratic-aligned: the group touts efforts to “flip seats in places that Donald Trump carried,” build “pro-democracy majorities,” and defeat candidates it identifies as election deniers.
Conan joins a roster of celebrity supporters that has included Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sally Field, Kerry Washington, and Shonda Rhimes, all of whom have appeared in fundraising appeals for the group since late 2025.
O’Brien’s involvement isn’t his first foray into politics, though he has historically been selective about when—and how—he puts his celebrity behind a political cause.
In 2020, he publicly backed Joe Biden, telling Michelle Obama on his podcast that he had generally never felt it was his place to be “very vocal” about whom he planned to vote for, but that election felt “very different.”
His political fundraising history goes back further. O’Brien headlined a 2010 fundraiser benefiting fellow SNL alum Al Franken and other Democratic candidates, and later participated in another fundraising effort for Franken’s reelection. He has also lent his celebrity to nonpartisan voting efforts, including a series of comedic voter-registration videos during the 2020 election.
That history makes the SLEA campaign less a political coming-out than another relatively rare instance of him choosing to put his name behind a specific political effort.
He has frequently drawn a distinction between having political views and making partisan politics the engine of his comedy. “I am just not a political comedian,” O’Brien said on his podcast in 2020, explaining that he preferred to focus on “what makes us inherently silly as human beings and not Republicans or Democrats.”
