Are you ready for it? What a Taylor Swift endorsement means for Kamala Harris

By Emma Shortis For The Conversation

Melbourne: As the US Presidential debate wrapped up on Wednesday, commentators and journalists regrouped and drew breath.

But then, enter Taylor Swift. The pop superstar posted her endorsement of the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket on social media. She followed it up by reminding the public to register to vote in her speech at the MTV Video Music Awards.

People listened. Within 24 hours, more than 400,000 visitors hit the voter registration website.

It’s always tempting to question the relevance of celebrity political endorsements. After all, endorsing products and brands is par for the course. So does a political nod from Taylor Swift really matter?

It sure does. It matters particularly to the young white women who form large parts of her engaged fanbase. Mobilising these women could have a huge impact on who turns up to vote – and ultimately, who wins the tight presidential race.

Why Taylor Swift?

The Harris campaign has already received its fair share of celebrity advocacy, most notably Charli XCX’s early declaration that Kamala is brat.

Beyonce hasn’t said anything explicitly, though she has given her tacit endorsement by giving Harris the right to use her song “Freedom” in advertising material.

Swift’s explicit endorsement adds a new level: it’s not just about having the backing of a singer, but of a cultural phenomenon.

Coming off the back of the European leg of the Eras Tour (the highest-grossing tour of all time), Swift has shown she can mobilise and energise millions of people. The Democrats would be wanting to tap into that.

She has 284 million Instagram followers. That’s an audience campaign strategists can only dream of.

It’s not the first time Swift has weighed in on political matters. That was in the 2018 midterms, when she urged her followers not to vote for Tennessee Republican senate nominee Marsha Blackburn.

Blackburn was ultimately elected, but Swift has continued to engage in politics. Last year, she used Voter Registration Day to call for people to sign up to vote. More than 35,000 people heeded the call.

Style and substance

It’s not surprising Swift threw her weight behind the Democrats, especially given the campaign’s focus on reproductive and minority rights.

Especially since 2019, Swift has advocated for these causes in her music. They’re causes she shares with many swifties.

This is why the endorsement is so crucial. While swifties are a group already primed to support Harris and Walz, getting them to vote is the key challenge. If mobilising large numbers of people is the goal, Swift is surely the person to help achieve it.

But swifties voting for the Democrats won’t just be doing so because their favourite singer told them to. It’s because they themselves believe in the substance of the policies put forward.

When one in three women in the United States live in a state with either full or heavily restrictive abortion bans, the impact on the lives of those women cannot be understated. These are issues that matter deeply to young women and LGBTQI+ communities.

Strategic timing

Swift’s wording in her statement was entirely deliberate. While she outlined why she’d be supporting Harris, she didn’t directly tell anyone to vote for the Democrats. Instead, she encouraged people to do their research and register to vote.

This degree of separation provides Swift with some plausible deniability from inevitable Republican attacks. As the Trump campaign seeks to paint the opposition as a bunch of rich, white, east coast elites, avoiding the direct call for swifties to vote for Harris blunts that attack. It’s also entirely in line with Swift’s approach to her fanbase more broadly, and implicitly supports Harris’ argument that women should be able to make their own decisions.

The timing, on the other hand, might not have been quite so mutually advantageous.

While Harris would clearly take a Swift endorsement in whatever form it came, one can imagine Democratic strategists might want to put more distance between it and the debate. That way, they could ride high off the debate, then have the Swift support as a standalone story down the line.

The rationale behind announcing it directly after the debate is unclear, but perhaps Swift wanted to use it to illustrate her independence from the Democrat party machine. Being speculative, it seems the timing was on her terms.

Of course, the party jumped on the opportunity. Friendship bracelets that went on sale minutes after the endorsement sold out almost immediately.

An Eras Tour vibe

One interesting part of Swift’s post is the explicit mention of Walz and his policy priorities.

Walz injected a sort of joyous dad quality to the Harris campaign. He regularly tells stories about helping care for your neighbours and being free to love whomever you love.

In many ways, Walz represents a dad at the Eras Tour supporting his daughters. He typifies a different sort of masculinity: one that isn’t intimidated by strong, successful women, and is not afraid to shake it off in a glitter-filled, girl-dominated space.

The Eras Tour has been filled with these examples of community-building. It’s demonstrated the power of the collective, spontaneous friendship and caring for each other, even if you’re strangers.

While the strength of the Trump vote shows there’s still widespread support for angry politics, many Americans are tired of being scared and threatened with violence.

Until the Harris campaign, there wasn’t a clear alternative energy. Now there is, and it’s not unlike the energy that thousands of girls and women (and their dads) bring to stadiums to watch Taylor Swift perform.

This could have a tangible impact on the election result. While untangling precisely what wins elections is always difficult, a Harris win could come down to only a couple of thousand votes in some swing states.

One extremely tight race is in Swift’s home state of Pennsylvania. If Swift motivated even a small portion of people to vote when they otherwise wouldn’t have engaged, it could have an outsized impact.

(Emma Shortis is with RMIT University)