(WASHINGTON) — Taylor Swift made headlines after Tuesday night’s debate by endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and experts are already looking at the pop star’s possible influence on the 2024 election.
“If you self-identify as someone who sees the world like Taylor Swift does, you might go, ‘Huh, maybe I should be voting like that also,'” Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan and author of the book For the Culture, told ABC News. “It sort of sends a bat signal for what potentially is acceptable for people like me.”
“This sort of social signaling is important to us,” he continued. “It helps us define who we are, our identity, what to think, how to behave.”
These effects can be subtle but significant, Collins said. For example, a conservative Swiftie might find those two identities at odds with each other and begin to question their beliefs.
“People may find themselves in cognitive dissonance, where their identity and how they see the world are in conflict with other parts of their identity,” he said. “There has to be some sense of reconciliation.”
The pop superstar said Tuesday night that she would be voting for Harris “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
Swift said she was voting for the Harris-Tim Walz ticket after doing her research and, in her post, encouraged her Instagram followers to do their own. She also shared a link to Vote.org, a resource to help people register to vote in their home state.
“She knows that she’s speaking to a number of people who will be voting either for the first time ever or for the first time for a president,” Megan Duncan, an associate professor at Virginia Tech specializing in political communication, told ABC News. “And she knows that getting that bit of education about how to register and that you can vote early in many states is the stuff that celebrities are effective at.”
This isn’t the first time Swift has encouraged her fans to register to vote. In 2018 and 2023, she also made Instagram posts about voter registration, and tens of thousands of people signed up in the days that followed.
Swift’s support for Harris shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Though once publicly apolitical, Swift has become more outspoken about her political beliefs in recent years. In 2020, she endorsed President Joe Biden and lambasted then-President Donald Trump for “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” and putting “millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”
Fans had long anticipated her making an endorsement in the 2024 race. Much of her fanbase is young — predominately millennials and Gen Z — a demographic that consistently has lower voter turnout than older generations and whose members may have never voted.
It’s not just young people Swift is in a position to sway. Many of her fans belong to another critical demographic: white women, over half of whom voted red in both 2016 and 2020.
“It’s a huge voter block — and not only that, but it’s a voter block that we’ve seen be consequential with regards to elections, particularly with Donald Trump,” Collins told ABC News.
How Swift’s endorsement will shape the election is yet to be seen, but her message’s reach has already been massive. The General Services Administration told ABC News that, as of 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, more than 330,000 people had visited the voter registration site linked by Swift.
Not long after Swift’s endorsement, a spokesperson for the vice president said Harris was “very proud” to have the singer’s support and said it came as a complete surprise.
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