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She was named Person of the Year by Time in 2023; a pop star with the power to impact a country’s economy and shatter all manner of industry records. But, Taylor Swift’s fans wonder, will she lend that influence to the looming US election?
Many of them have already leapt into action to get vice president Kamala Harris elected, following the news that president Joe Biden was dropping out of the 2024 race.
“I feel like us US Swifties should mass organise and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous Project 2025 would be to help get people's butts down to the polls in November,” Emerald Medrano, a Latinx trans man, wrote in a post on X/Twitter, the day that Biden dropped out.
“Like if we don't want democracy to end we really need to move and push blue votes.”
Now, Swifties for Kamala is a thousands-strong community working to encourage fellow fans to register to vote, particularly in the three states Swift will perform in shortly before Election Day – Florida, Louisiana and Indiana – all of which went Republican in 2020.
“Harris is a very intelligent and powerful woman; she’s a trailblazer,” Medrano told The Cut, explaining the parallels he sees between the Democratic nominee and his favourite pop star.
“The way she has opened doors and also takes care of the people who come after her through that door reminds me in a lot of ways of Taylor and the ways she cares about people in the music industry.
“I really love that connection between them. Harris also makes me feel that she cares about me – my rights and my identity. This is someone I wanna vote for.”
Swift, 34, has yet to endorse a candidate in this year’s election. She was notoriously quiet about her political leanings – supposedly out of fear of alienating members of her enormous fanbase – until 2018, when she publicly endorsed two Democratic candidates in Tennessee during the midterms.
“I need to be on the right side of history,” she told her parents and members of her team, in a behind-the-scenes clip in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana.
The “Look What You Made Me Do” singer also endorsed Biden in 2020, as she accused Donald Trump of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism”.
“We will vote you out in November,” she wrote, tagging Trump.
Trump and his controversial VP candidate, JD Vance, certainly won’t have swayed Swift with their recent campaigning.
In July, comments by Vance were resurfaced as they showed him calling Democrat women “a bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives” who are “making the country miserable too”.
“It would obviously be great if Taylor did endorse because we’ve seen what kind of power she has to mobilise,” Swifties for Harris co-founder Carly Long, 25, told ABC News.
“But I think that that’s not what we’re waiting for. We have a lot of autonomy as Swifties within our own community to empower ourselves to make action.”
Medrano said he believes Swift will make an endorsement: “She endorsed president Biden before, so I believe that she will make an endorsement,” he said.
“But at the same time, we are not waiting. Our movement is about the power that we have as a community and what we as Swifties wanna see in the White House – the issues we care about, what we want to see represented.”
Swift was named as the fifth-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2023, with Harris at number three.
Forbes noted that Swift had the potential to be more influential, though: “All those people with hard power are truly poweful women,” said Stacy Jones, founder of marketing agency Hollywood Branded, “but they’re not going to be able to change the world in the way that Taylor Swift is.”
The Independent has contacted Swift’s representative for comment.
Harris already has the public support of a number of pop stars, including Beyoncé, who gave her permission to use her track “Freedom” as a campaign song, while Katy Perry and Ariana Grande have urged their followers to vote for her.
British pop singer Charli XCX also lent her influence to Harris, tweeting last month that “Kamala IS Brat”, in reference to her latest, breakthrough album Brat, which sparked the “Brat Summer” trend.
Harris’s team swiftly changed the banner and profile picture on her HQ X/Twitter account to resemble the neon green and low-resolution font used in Charli XCX’s album artwork.
