How Taylor Swift Could Potentially Shake Up The 2024 Election
Taylor Swift has gone beyond being just a singer and songwriter; she's a cultural icon with big influence — you can even take college classes about Swift and The Eras Tour has been cited as helping boost the country's economy. Swift may even have the power to impact the 2024 presidential election with some people thinking that Donald Trump has a new rival in Swift while President Joe Biden's team is apparently hoping to get an endorsement from the singer during this election cycle.
Swift gave her first ever public presidential endorsement to Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020. Biden's team has already considered what Swift's support would mean for their 2024 campaign, so much so that in a job advertisement for a Director of Social Communications, they included the line: "Please do not tell us that we need a Taylor Swift strategy. We are tracking."
To see why people are talking about Swift and the election in the same conversation, it's important to realize the level of influence that she wields. On September 19, 2023, aka National Voter Registration Day, Swift encouraged her Instagram followers to register to vote with a link to Vote.org. After that post, over 35,000 people registered to vote.
Taylor Swift has shown she has the power to get people engaged politically
There isn't a way to know for sure that it was Taylor Swift's post that caused every single one of those 35,000+ newly registered voters, but Andrea Hailey, CEO of Vote.org, did tell NPR that there was a significant jump in traffic to the website after she posted. "Our site was averaging 13,000 users every 30 minutes — a number that Taylor Swift would be proud of," Hailey said.
People definitely noticed. In the week after her post, California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked by TMZ about the election and celebrities. "Taylor Swift stands tall and unique," Newsom said. "What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful."
Swift's potential influence on the election has also been noticed by those on the right as well. Considering her past support of Joe Biden over Donald Trump, the angle seems to be to put Swift on blast. Some on the far-right have gone so far as to claim that the Kansas City Chiefs got to the Super Bowl as a way to give Swift a chance to endorse Biden at the game.
Taylor Swift first came out with a political endorsement in 2018
While most of Taylor Swift's music isn't overtly political, her song "Only the Young" from the closing credits of "Miss Americana," a 2020 documentary about Swift's life, was directly inspired by the 2018 midterm elections. 2018 marked the first time that Swift got publicly involved in politics. In a moment that's included in "Miss Americana," Swift talked about how she felt compelled to speak out publicly against certain politicians, saying "I need to be on the right side of history." In her first political Instagram post, Swift specifically called out Republican Marsha Blackburn, who would go on to win the Tennessee senate seat despite Swift's opposition. It's Blackburn's win, and others like her, that seemed to particularly stoke Swift's songwriting fuel for "Only the Young."
Swift explained why she hadn't come out publicly about her political beliefs before in an interview with Variety in 2020. Swift revealed how much she was impacted by the backlash and blacklisting The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks, faced after their comments about the then-President George W. Bush. "I saw how one comment ended such a powerful reign, and it terrified me. [...] I registered it — that you're always one comment away from being done being able to make music."
Taylor Swift hasn't yet endorsed Biden but almost certainly won't ever endorse Trump
While Taylor Swift hasn't yet openly said who she'd be voting for in 2024, it does seem fairly safe to assume that if Donald Trump is the Republican candidate, she won't be supporting him. Swift tweeted against Trump more than once in 2020, including in May when she wrote, in part, "We will vote you out in November." We doubt that her opinion of Trump has changed any in the intervening years.
Like those voters who may or may not have registered thanks to Swift in 2023, we can't really track how much, if any, direct impact Swift's opposition to Trump had on the 2020 election. As for 2024, Newsweek conducted a poll, asking voters if Swift's support of a political candidate would impact their own voting. Just 18% of those surveyed would vote for a Swift-endorsed candidate. But before any Biden fans get too excited, the poll showed that 17% wouldn't vote for a Swift-endorsed candidate with 55% saying her endorsement wouldn't impact them at all. Whether that extra 1% of voters who would vote the same way as Swift would is enough to swing an election, only time will tell.