Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton’s romance has been an opposites attract situation from the jump: She’s just a girl who once stood as an anti-establishment punk pop icon, while he’s a country music superstar with a history of very bad tweets.
Their love story took many of her longtime fans by surprise, but that hasn’t stopped the couple from falling hard for each other. After meeting on the set of “The Voice” back in 2015, the two dated for years before announcing their engagement in October.
Some still have lingering questions about Stefani’s own political beliefs, especially considering Shelton’s apparent conservative leanings and past statements about Donald Trump.
Speaking with Paper magazine in a cover story published on Wednesday, Stefani fielded a question about whether “she’s a Republican now” given her ties to Shelton.
“If you’re going to be a star, that’s what you get,” she told the outlet. “You know what I mean? You get what you get, and you don’t get upset, at all.”
“I can see how people would be curious, but I think it’s pretty obvious who I am,” she continued. “I’ve been around forever. I started my band because we were really influenced by ska, which was a movement that happened in the late ’70s, and it was really all about people coming together. The first song I ever wrote was a song called ‘Different People,’ which was on the Obama playlist, you know, a song about everyone being different and being the same and loving each other. The very first song I wrote.”
She went onto describe how her early work with No Doubt was influenced by ska groups, including The Specials and The Selecter, because of “what they were doing in the late ’70s was this whole kind of anti-racism, we come together, Black and white ska movement.”
But Stefani stopped short of explicitly expressing where she falls on the political spectrum, explaining that in her eyes the “whole point of voting” is having “this personal space to feel how you feel.”
“I use my platform to share my life story and to engage with people and to exchange whatever gift I was giving,” she continued. “I’m not a political science major. I am not that person. Everyone knows that. So why would I even talk about it?”
Stefani has historically supported Democratic politicians, hosting a fundraiser alongside Michelle Obama back in 2012, while she and Shelton performed a duet at former President Barack Obama’s final state dinner in 2016.
Shelton has been similarly cagey about his political leanings after stirring controversy (and attracting Debra Messing’s Twitter wrath) for appearing to defend Trump ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
“Whether you love him or hate him, he says what he thinks, and he has proven that you don’t always have to be so afraid,” he told Billboard. “A lot of people are pulling for him, no matter how much Hollywood fights it. I see people who don’t like him go and beat up people that do like him. You tell me, who’s crazy here? I probably wish there was another option, but there’s not.”
A year later, the singer posed for a photo with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, which only fueled the speculation about his right-leaning political beliefs.