Pop superstar Taylor Swift, signing herself “Childless Cat Lady,” endorsed Kamala Harris for president last night, after Harris’ energizing takedown of Donald Trump in the first, and maybe only, presidential debate of the 2024 fall cycle.
Of note here: the way Swift laid out her endorsement, which she made public on Instagram, she made it clear that it was Trump himself who had unwittingly – not that he ever does anything wittingly, but still – made her do it.
“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” Swift wrote on Instagram.
Now, to the endorsement, which, at this writing, has received 8.8 million likes:
“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
The accompanying photo features Swift and her cat, Benjamin Button, with the “Childless Cat Lady” sign-off an obvious reference to the comments made by Trump’s running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, who has denigrated childless women who back the Harris-Walz ticket.
Video: Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris
So, throwing shade at women has worked out for the Trump-Vance side, and the clumsy Swifties for Trump AI, man, yeah, good work there, goading the most-recognized celebrity in the world to come clean, just as early voting is about to start.
As important as the endorsement, which, it wasn’t a secret who Swift was going to be backing, was the language in her endorsement message about the importance of being registered to vote.
“I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story,” Swift wrote.
One can also imagine that Swift and her team will have voter-registration booths at her upcoming U.S. tour dates – her next stop has her at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Oct. 18-20, and though Florida has been reliably red the past couple of election cycles, the presence of a referendum on the state’s six-week abortion ban, and recent polls showing Harris two or three points behind Trump in the Sunshine State, could make things interesting down there.
“Swift’s platform is so large, and it reaches a younger audience, which tends to be a less active voting demographic. So, this may encourage Gen Z fans to volunteer and vote,” said Cayce Myers, the director of graduate studies at the School of Communication at Virginia Tech.
There you go – you could call it the poking-the-bear effect.
Trump, who isn’t good at finding out that people don’t like him, is, predictably, swiping back at Swift, who, and of course he did this, but Trump had told an interviewer a couple of months ago he thinks Swift is “very beautiful, actually, unusually beautiful.”
“Well, I actually like Mrs., I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth. She’s a big Trump fan,” Trump said in an appearance this morning on “Fox & Friends,” referencing Brittany Mahomes, the MAGA wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the teammate of Travis Kelce, who is Swift’s current beau.
Swift, Trump said, “couldn’t, you couldn’t possibly endorse Biden. You look at Biden, you couldn’t possibly endorse him. But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat. And she’ll probably pay a price for it at the, in the marketplace. But no, I like Brittany. I think Brittany is great. Brittany got a lot of news last week. She’s a big, she’s a big MAGA fan. That’s the one I like much better than Taylor Swift.”
Brittany Mahomes, for what it’s worth, has 2.1 million followers on Instagram; Taylor Swift has 283 million followers on Instagram.
Another for what it’s worth: Trump, who has long made it clear that he desperately wants to be a member of the cool kids’ club – he tried to buy an NFL team, got rejected, because of finances; finagled things so that he’d get cameos in movies, like “Home Alone 2,” and was roundly mocked – is coming up far short in the celebrity endorsement war.
The best he could do for the Republican National Convention, you might remember, was Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan.
Touting Brittany Mahomes, who is only known because of who she married, is par for the course for Trump, while Harris now has Taylor Swift and, soon, and we’re waiting on you, Beyonce, to weigh in on the race to your 316 million Instagram followers.
Do celebrity endorsements tilt the scales one way or the other? No. But they do work at “getting people who are disengaged, like Gen Z, from the political process to pay attention, effectively widening the audience,” said Megan Duncan, an associate professor in the School of Communication at Virginia Tech, whose research focuses on how partisans judge the credibility of and engage with the news.
The last time the audience got widened didn’t work out so well for Trump, who got 11 million more votes in his 2020 run than he did in 2016, but still lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes, because Biden was able to build on Hillary Clinton’s total from 2016 by 15 million votes.
The more people who come out to vote, in particular, the more under-30s who come out to vote, the worse it will be for Trump, whose base is firmly entrenched in the geriatric.
Which is why Trump tried last month to claim the Taylor Swift endorsement with the Swifties for Trump stunt.
He can cry to the skies above that he didn’t want Taylor Swift on his side, but we all know the truth.
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Chris Graham
