No, Taylor Swift won’t swing the presidential election

If, for some reason, you were waiting on Taylor Swift to help you decide how to cast your vote in the 2024 US presidential election, then the wait is now over. Following last night’s presidential debate, the ‘Fortnight’ singer made an Instagram post endorsing Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Alongside a picture of herself holding her cat, Swift revealed that she will ‘be casting my vote for Kamala Harris… because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.’ She signed off the post as ‘Taylor Swift, childless cat lady’ – a dig at JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, who once lamented that the Democrats are supposedly run by ‘miserable’ unmarried and childless women.

Aside from the catty dig at Vance, it’s a fittingly vague endorsement, given that the vice-president has infamously avoided taking any strong positions or offering any concrete policies. Which ‘rights and causes’ Swift imagines Harris will champion in the White House remain a mystery.

Really, no one should be too surprised that Swift – a rich Millennial white woman – would vote Democrat. It’s hardly unusual for celebrities to back the Democrats, either.

Until recently, Swift rarely spoke out about politics. Despite being in the public eye since the 2000s, her first political endorsement was not until 2018, when she backed an unsuccessful Democratic senate candidate in her native Tennessee. She then endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020. After that, a Harris-Walz endorsement this time around was surely not so unexpected.

Yet judging by the media reaction, you’d think that Swift’s vaguely worded praise for Harris had just single-handedly changed the trajectory of US politics. Apparently, she has already saved the Democrats’ lacklustre campaign, defeated Donald Trump and thus rescued American democracy from the grips of semi-fascism.

The fawning has been relentless. Emily Maitlis, presenter of the News Agents podcast, gushed over Swift being ‘so calmly rational’. ‘She doesn’t need to attack Trump’, Maitlis wrote on X, ‘she just says she’s researched the issues… And like that the electoral race has exploded.’ Jon Sopel, Maitlis’s co-host, was similarly awed. ‘Wow’, he wrote on X, not once, but three times.

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell went even further. He praised Swift’s Instagram post as ‘the most important celebrity endorsement we’ve ever seen… The timing on it is absolutely exquisite, the wording of it is flawless… this is perfect and powerful.’ I’m not convinced he read the same post as the rest of us.

Predictably, the Harris-Walz campaign is milking this for all it’s worth. Walz thanked Swift for her ‘courage’ as a ‘fellow cat owner’. When Harris dropped in on a Democratic debate watch-party in Philadelphia, she reportedly left to the sound of Swift’s song, ‘The Man’. The Harris-Walz official website is now even selling Swift-inspired friendship bracelets. We have reached unprecedented levels of cringe.

While the Swift endorsement has clearly excited the Democrats and their media cheerleaders, it’s not clear at all that it’ll have any impact on the election. As it stands, the majority of voting-age Swifties – being young women – would likely back the Democrats anyway.

In any case, if celebrity endorsements won elections, then Hillary Clinton would be enjoying her second term in the White House right now. Her list of celeb backers in 2016 is long enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page, although she famously failed to win over the people that actually count – the American voters, who care about real issues, not the carbon-copy opinions of famous people. The fact that securing Swift’s endorsement for 2024 was a key aim of the Democrats for this election suggests that they are as out-of-touch with the voters as ever.

The fawning over the Swift endorsement is a damning indictment of today’s shallow, vibes-based and clout-chasing politics. They need to calm down.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.