As a celebrity, Mr. Springer had none of the glamour of, say, a Beyoncé, a George Clooney or a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — some of the names occasionally mentioned as possible political recruits. But that’s the point. For Democrats, the issue of being perceived as talking down to voters is one that the party continues to struggle with. Many of the voters who improbably regard Mr. Trump, a gilded billionaire, as an everyman with a common touch, cheered for Mr. Springer because he seemed relatable and never condescending. That kind of figure, coupled with a talent for showmanship, might prove a recipe for success now, even more so than it did for Mr. Springer during the political career he began prior to his rise to fame as a talk-show host.
Before Mr. Springer became an icon of bad taste, and before his name — Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! — became a kind of tawdry war cry, he had a promising career in government. He was an idealistic and ambitious progressive reformer elected to office in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the 1970s as a city councilman. He appealed to countercultural college students and blue-collar workers alike. During his time in City Hall, he opposed the Vietnam War, led a successful campaign to create a city-owned bus system and advocated reforms at the local jail. He resigned from the City Council in 1974, following a prostitution scandal — a seeming career ender at the time, though one he came back from, successfully reclaiming his seat and then serving as mayor of Cincinnati.
Both his political gifts and his nose for spectacle would contribute to his rise as a big-tent TV celebrity. That tent included many of the kind of people Hillary Clinton would later label “deplorables,” an infamous slight. Even as his studio audience — and many critics — sneered at Mr. Springer’s guests and judged him for putting them on his televised circus, he always managed to seem genuinely interested in them: their feelings, their decisions and occasionally their hopes for the future.
After Mr. Springer ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in the Ohio governor’s race in 1982, he essentially stumbled into a career in media — first as a pundit delivering commentaries on the news, then as an Emmy-winning evening news anchor, then, starting in 1991, as the host of a daytime talk show focused on current affairs and human interest stories.
After a stretch of incurably low ratings, “The Jerry Springer Show” began its transformation into the shocking free-for-all that we remember, and he became an international celebrity. But he spent the rest of his life looking for ways to get back into politics, even as his infamy made the prospect less viable. He seriously explored running for statewide office again in Ohio during three separate election cycles, starting around the time of his show’s commercial peak in the late 1990s. He found that neither voters nor party leaders were willing to look past his TV show: A University of Cincinnati poll in 2003 found that he had an unfavorability rating of 71 percent.
