Only Taylor Swift could so successfully and immediately bigfoot the coverage of a shockingly consequential presidential debate within hours of its conclusion. Last night, less than half an hour after Kamala Harris baited Trump into portraying himself as a babbling conspiracy bot, Swift dropped a new banger, endorsing Harris on Instagram. In her instantly viral post, Swift suggested the A.I. depictions of her as a Trump endorser gave her little choice but to clarify her voting intentions. As numerous former paramours, and at least one private equity firm, might have cautioned: Woe betide anyone who fucks with Taylor Swift.
Swift’s preferences are unsealed. A rather nagging question comes to the surface: Now what? One would have thought Dick Cheney’s endorsement would be the upper limit of what unearthly mercurial powers Harris could harness, but Swift’s reach is even greater—and harder to tether.
The only candidate in the United States to have received an endorsement from a celebrity as powerful and as well loved as Taylor Swift is Beto O’Rourke, who was treated on Election Day in 2018 to an image of Beyoncé wearing one of his campaign’s signature trucker hats. It was a stamp of approval in his race against the most loathed politician in America, Ted Cruz, from, as he puts it, “perhaps the most famous person to ever emerge from the state of Texas.”
We all remember how that worked out. O’Rourke, in fact, collected celebrity endorsements like Cruz collects airline points for trips out of state, but Willie Nelson + LeBron James + Spoon did not add up to victory.
You’d think this would make him cynical about the difference that Swift could make this time around. But when I talked to O’Rourke the morning afte Swift’s announcement for my election-countdown podcast, 90 Days with Ana Marie Cox, he said his experience with star power in elections makes him more optimistic about her impact on the 2024 presidential race (and further down the ballot as well).
What might make things different this time out? First of all, someone (maybe the meticulous Swift herself) put considerable thought into the timing of the announcement. While O’Rourke is not stupid enough to criticize Beyoncé, I’ll offer a critique that might inform her next foray into politics: the endorsement came the afternoon of the election, 28 days after Texas’s voter registration deadline passed. The presumably youthful and unengaged demographic Bey might have otherwise reached—fence sitters who hadn’t yet been swept up by O’Rourke’s own significant registration push (youth turnout in that election tripled the previous cycle’s showing)—were locked out.
(Side note: I suspect that O’Rourke might have been unique among Democrats to not have fallen for that Bey-at-the-DNC rumor.)
The bad timing and razor margin of the results would make any observer a little (or a lot!) wistful. “I always wondered, I mean, who knows?” he says, “I just wondered if Beyoncé—and we thank the Lord for her, period—if that had come earlier, what might that have done?” This is not an experiment Swift will be running: By putting out the call to register in mid-September, Swift has given her followers four weeks to get in the system before conservative states such as Texas close their rolls, 30 days before the election (the earliest deadline allowed by law).
Second, someone (again, one has to suspect that angel-voiced control freak was thinking about all of this) released a statement decidedly more energetic than the uncharacteristically bashful posture Beyoncé offered, in which only her hat made a direct reference to O’Rourke; her Instagram caption failing to mention a single issue or reason to vote beyond the familiar, generic scolding of those who don’t: “We can’t voice our frustrations and complain about what’s wrong without voting and exercising our power to make it right.” (Again, it would have been possible to act upon this sentiment had voter registration not been over at that point.)
But O’Rourke is more sympathetic than Beyoncé on this point. Not voting in Texas hardly means you have no right to complain. Texas is “the most voter-suppressive state in the country. It’s harder to cast a ballot, harder to register to vote in Texas” than anywhere else. “You could not find fault with a single person who said, fuck this, I’m not waiting in line for nine hours.… I blame this country. I blame our state. I blame the people in positions of power.” Rourke’s current foray into public service is a battle against repressive forces in Texas: Powered by People is on the ground to register voters and then stay in touch with these newly-engaged folks, sheparding them through the many hurdles imposed by a state Republican party terrified by Texas’ shifting purple hue.
One of the biggest weaknesses of Democratic campaigns against Trump has been their insistence on appealing to fuzzy ideals like democracy and citizenship and the free press. You win elections by promising to make people’s lives better—or, more traditionally, threatening them with a life that’s materially worse. Republicans know this: You win elections by making them personal.
The Harris campaign has shaped Biden’s warnings about the end of democracy into less amorphous heralds. At the debate, Harris made the stakes clear. A Trump presidency puts voters at risk of bleeding out from an ectopic pregnancy, or being scarified in a less literal way, just so Trump gets a very expensive lesson about how tariffs work. Swift explained her own decision in terms that may not apply to anyone else but her—not many tweens worry about being at the center of an A.I.-spewed hoax. But the way Swift was able to put the election, and her decision, in terms of what’s at stake in a visceral, real sense invited her followers to make the same considerations. If the cruelties of our politics can prick Swift’s skin, it’s not hard to imagine how much more piercingly they might penetrate those of us with less well-protected hides.
As it happens, O’Rourke has scholarship on the celebrity endorsement beyond the Beyhive. Four years after Beyoncé weighed in on the O’Rourke-Cruz race, O’Rourke’s campaign received a call from Harry Styles’s people, who invited him to hang out backstage at the Moody Center before Styles appeared to a sold-out crowd of 15,000 wearing a custom Gucci ensemble and brandishing a Beto sticker on his guitar. Styles’s effort was slightly better timed, coming as it did with three days left to register. But there’s no evidence that, in a race Beto lost by 11 points, a needle was sufficiently moved.
O’Rourke still believes that Styles’s endorsement pushed Texas in one direction—and in the right (left?) one at that. As O’Rourke recalls, Styles was more direct, more timely, and—in a way that prefigured Swift’s endorsement of Harris—more focused on politics, as opposed to simply about voting.
As O’Rourke told me, the conversations that Styles engendered continue to right this very moment:
I’m helping to register these young people, so many of them say the only reason I care about politics or know who you are, Beto, is because of Harry Styles. So, these folks are able to break through. … Will it produce what we want in the moment? Not always … but it will contribute over time to what we’re looking for, which is what Taylor Swift is focused on: I wanna make sure that you’re registered and in the game so that you yourself have a vote and have a voice in that. That[’s] for our democracy—and yes, for Kamala Harris—but also for elections down the road.
I don’t want to stake too much on the rest of the country looking anything like Texas; I know that such a thing sounds like a threat and not a promise to most of you. But the young people that O’Rourke is continuing to register—the same ones that might be receptive to Swift’s ask—have not bowed under to a decade of far-right rule. They haven’t stopped caring. According to modeling done by the political marketing firm Target Smart, people under 30 make up almost half of all new voter registrations. What’s more, the +16 point registration advantage for Republicans in 2020 seems to have shifted to a +10 point advantage by Democrats.
There’s a chance those party numbers are statistical smoke and mirrors. In Texas, there’s no party ID to voter registration. But with Swift’s endorsement and an influx of voters who have known nothing but a media and political ecosphere in which one of the poles is soul-sucking orange man in perpetual goblin mode, there is reason to believe that a future obscured by doubt is not the same as one darkened by doom.
No one that O’Rourke is registering—and presumably none of the people who will respond to Swift’s post—will be counted in polling averages that the media obsesses over every day. They are not answering their phones, for one thing. Without any voting record at all, they are all but statistically invisible. “No one is polling [them], I don’t think, in any serious, effective, successful, truly reflective way,” said O’Rourke. The newly franchised Swifties may never make a dent in national averages. They certainly won’t anytime soon. “If they’re unregistered as of yesterday, they are definitionally not part of the electorate and not part of a pollster’s sample.”
The much-abused pundit class is already setting a marker that neither the debate nor Swift’s endorsement will make much of a difference. It’s in their best interests to keep things close, after all. Chin-strokers will use sluggish polls as proof that the race will be all steep uphill.
My recommendation: Don’t fucking despair. The polls may not move. It was the shy and unlikely voters that put Trump over the top in 2016; the shy-unlikelies won’t be part of the MAGA coalition this time around. Trump comes to the race with a high floor because he has his true believers in tow. If Harris can get an army of new believers to raise her ceiling higher, they will end the Trump era once and for all.