Esoteric Chat

Is Taylor Swift finally big enough to affect the election?

In this particular election, it’s hard to say she couldn’t.

Taylor Swift performs during her Eras tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17, 2023.

Later this month, thousands of members of a massive international constituency plan to join a conference call in support of Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential bid. Other such calls have convened Black women or White men, Republicans and even (in a nod to past comments from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance) cat ladies. But the group getting on the phone in a few weeks might have an influence that those others don't.

A “Swiftie,” as you probably know, is a fan of musician Taylor Swift. Swift is one of the most famous celebrities in the world and has a (probably immeasurably) huge base of fans. Once President Joe Biden announced that he was no longer going to seek the Democratic nomination for president, some of Swift’s fans formed an ad hoc group to support his replacement. The effect might be that, six years after Swift first dipped her toes into politics, her fans could help swing a presidential election.

One reason that's the case is that Swift's profile has fairly recently skyrocketed. Google searches for her name were relatively steady until 2020, peaking with awards shows or album releases. With the launch of her “Eras” tour last year, it surged. Swift has never been the focus of more search interest than she was in February of this year — the month of the Super Bowl in which her boyfriend Travis Kelce was playing.

YouGov polling shows that Swift’s favorability has increased since 2018 as well. In October that year, right about the time that she offered her endorsement of a (ultimately unsuccessful) Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, 46 percent of Americans viewed her favorably. In January of this year, that had climbed to 54 percent. Swift is now viewed favorably by most American men, women and Democrats. Her favorability improved among independents and Republicans, too, and surged in particular among younger Americans.

The stereotype that has followed Swift for years, of course, is that her fan base is largely made up of tween and young-teenage girls. There’s an element of truth to that, certainly, but a 13-year-old Swift fan in 2018 is now a 19-year-old Swift fan who is old enough to vote.

Whether Swift endorses Harris remains to be seen. (Swifties4Kamala is not a function of the artist’s efforts.) But she may not need to do so to have an effect.

One of the shifts in the race that followed Harris's rise to the nomination was that younger voters, shown in polling to be apathetic about the prospect of reelecting Biden, have begun shifting more favorably toward Harris. Several recent polls, including in swing states, have suggested that Harris's improved position relative to Trump is in part a function of her enjoying wider margins with younger Americans.

Against Biden, Trump’s relative position with younger voters was weaker when pollsters filtered for the likelihood of voting. This is the central question with younger voters, as it always is: Will they actually turn out to vote? A deliberate effort to increase turnout within Swift’s fan base would probably benefit Harris. One reason that Biden won in 2020 after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 was that the electorate four years ago had a larger percentage of young voters.

And again, Swift is more popular, and interest in Swift is larger than it was four years ago. Her fan base is enthusiastic and centered on community and common identifiers in a way that didn’t exist to the same degree four years ago. If voting or pressing one’s parents to vote for Kamala Harris — for the potential first woman president — becomes even a small element of Swift fandom, it’s hard to know what the effect might be.

Should Swift take an active hand in stoking that engagement, the effects would probably be non-trivial. When she last year encouraged her Instagram followers to register to vote, tens of thousands did. If Swift encourages her fan base to make a plan to vote in November and to work with their parents or partners or friends to do so, voter turnout would increase. (Online community encouragement can have a demonstrable effect on the number of people casting a ballot.)

Again, this is without considering an explicit endorsement. If Swift does endorse Harris (as she did with Biden in 2020), this, too, might boost the Democrat's vote total. A Suffolk University poll conducted for USA Today in May asked Americans whether a Swift endorsement would influence their vote choice. Most said it wouldn't. But 9 percent of respondents said it might influence them at least a little — including 1 in 10 women, Americans under 35 and independents. This is probably overstated, but a Swiftian nudge would not do nothing.

The nature of this presidential contest appears, at the moment, to mirror what we saw in 2016 and 2020: a race that favors the Democrat nationally but that might come down to narrow vote totals in several swing states. Biden’s electoral vote majority was a function of fewer than 50,000 votes in three states four years ago. Getting a small segment of the massive Taylor Swift fan base to vote that otherwise wouldn’t? Hard to dismiss the idea that it could tip the balance.

Since August 2023, the state with the seventh-most search interest in Taylor Swift was Pennsylvania, believed to be the most likely state to swing the results of the 2024 presidential contest. Wisconsin was 14th.

This may not mean anything. Or it may mean that, after the surge in Swift’s popularity, everything has changed.

Taken from Washington Post