Photo: Bernie DeChant

“When the candidates posted on social, they’d get maybe 400 views,” says Salett, “but when Mark and Jason posted about them, they’d get 25,000 views.” All the candidates they supported won.

Since then, says Salett, the Hometown Project—which he runs with a founding executive director—has been hired by political nonprofits and Democratic Party chapters in a variety of states. (Hometown is not technically a partisan group but it mostly supports Democratic candidates because they most often align with its clients’ policy priorities, says Salett.) Last year, he says, 18 of 21 candidates for seats in Virginia and New Jersey supported by Hometown won—thanks in part, he hopes, to the 2 million voters who saw 20 million impressions of ads featuring Ruffalo, Connie Britton, Patton Oswalt, Wanda Sykes, and Jason Mraz in Virginia and Danny DeVito, Piper Perabo, Taissa Farmiga, and Tom Colicchio in New Jersey.

But doesn’t Hometown risk seeming as though it’s getting people who’ve become rich Hollywood liberals to tell the folks back home what to do? “We make sure we find ‘energizers’”—that’s what Hometown calls its VIP voices— “with a real connection to where they’re from, such as their parents still live there,” says Salett. “And they never prescribe policy positions. They just talk about their own values.”

This election year, says Salett, the Hometown Project plans to be active in states including Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, New Jersey, and Ohio. Salett invites Brown alums to follow or connect with the group at thehometownproject.org or @hometownvoices on X (formerly Twitter). “You may well know someone with a big platform who wants to get involved this cycle,” he says. “In which case, send them our way.”