Taylor Swift is the influencer to end all influencers, able to wield her massive popularity and power effectively enough to impact economies and legislation, moviemaking practices and album release strategies. She’s lent her voice in the past, to great effect, to voter registration efforts, but with the news that Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party nominee, will Swift endorse her in her 2024 campaign against Republican nominee Donald Trump?
Swift was named the fifth-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2023, owing to her dominance across those various sectors and ability to influence them on the macro level, while still reaching individual people on the micro level. Harris is on the list too, and in fact outranks Swift at No. 3, but, as Forbes points out, Swift’s power, speaking directly into the ears of millions, is a different flavor than Harris’ “hard power” as a legislator. An endorsement from Swift would be an incomparable asset to Harris’ nascent 2024 campaign.
While Swift kept mum about her political opinions early in her career out of fear of alienating potential fans, the 2020 documentary Miss Americana showed the world the moment she broke rank in 2018, publicly endorsing two Democratic candidates in midterm races in Tennessee.
“I need to be on the right side of history,” she says in the doc, clutching her phone and preparing to push the button to post her political message on Instagram as her mom and publicist look nervously on.
That was the first of several political actions in Swift’s public life. She’s shown that a flap of her proverbial butterfly wings can cause a hurricane of political awareness: In 2023, she drove some 32,000 voter registrations after urging fans to sign up to make their voices heard on her platforms. She has also spoken out against Trump specifically several times, not mincing words in a 2020 tweet calling him “racist” and endorsing President Joe Biden in that election, and another where she urges people to vote early and condemn Donald Trump’s “ineffective leadership.”
This time around, she’s even been at the center of a red-state conspiracy theory, with 18 percent of Americans polled in February saying they think that she may be part of a covert operation to reelect Biden (and rig the Super Bowl, a contest just as important though more frequent than a presidential election, to boot). In the same poll, 68 percent said they approved of her voter registration efforts. While those rumors that Biden was yearning for her to help out with his campaign never came to fruition, Swift has infiltrated the Trump household: Ivanka Trump last week shared photos of “favorite Swiftie” Arabella’s 13th birthday, complete with a “Bad Blood”-inspired birthday cake.
So the world (especially Democratic organizers) waits with bated breath to see if Swift will throw her considerable cultural weight behind Harris, the newly anointed great hope of the Democratic Party. A “Swifties for Harris” account on X (formerly Twitter) has already been created, unaffiliated with Swift herself, and the Swifties are at the ready to carry out their stilettoed leader’s bidding.
A representative for Swift did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.