Taylor Swift is currently one of the biggest stars in the country. She is still on her record-breaking “Eras” tour, ranks as the second-most-played artist on Spotify this year, and, in July, scored the biggest week of sales for an album this year with “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).” She’s using that cultural clout to urge her fans, known as “Swifties,” to register to vote.
Swift posted an Instagram story on Tuesday, marking National Voter Registration Day.
“I’ve been so lucky to see so many of you guys at my US shows recently,” she wrote. “I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year!”
She went on to offer concrete advice on how: “Register to vote in less than 2 minutes at vote.org/nvrd.” As a result, Vote.org’s communications director tweeted, “our site was averaging 13,000 users every 30 minutes.”
This isn’t a first for Swift. In 2018, she was credited with a surge in young voter registrations after she endorsed two Tennessee Democrats and promoted voter registration. She called on fans to vote in 2020, and just this July, she went local with a post about the Nashville mayoral race.
The question is how much of a difference even arguably the biggest pop star in the country can make. Obviously, Swift’s powers are limited—she can’t propel a Democrat to a statewide win in Tennessee. But getting young people out to vote has historically been tough, and every little bit can help.
In 2020, young voter turnout was up substantially from 2016. It typically drops way off in midterm elections, but 2018 set a record for youth turnout, at 28%. Youth turnout wasn’t quite as high in 2022, at 23%, but that was still significantly higher than the 13% who voted in 2014—and in four states, young voter turnout was higher in 2022 than in 2018. Two of those states were the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Democrats made important pickups.
Because, yes, young voters do lean Democratic. That may be particularly true in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, and all the ensuing state abortion bans: People ages 18 to 29 are the most likely to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases.
It’s unlikely that Taylor Swift is the magical answer to decades of struggles in getting young people out to vote. But in a tight election—and many of them are so tight these days—young people can make a difference. And having Swift promoting voter registration and reminding Swifties to follow through and vote is definitely a plus.
The world could use more celebrities doing this. Kudos to her.
True, but it’s sad that some people need a celebrity to be the impetus to get them to register.
Part of that could be cured in the education system. The two main parties in the UK are happy that the country has an ignorance regarding the importance of voting. The US is very much the same. It is much easier to pander to a small voter base. If the kids start voting then this pushes strategies into the long grass.
It’s an aging voter base with an average age around 50, maybe even older. Sure, it’s great younger people finally go voting, but a majority will always be older for the coming election cycles.
Shouldn’t be like that imo. We should be educating kids better.
Educating a dwindling numbers of young people won’t help if the whole population grows older and older. Baby boomers are pulling the average well above 50 and are more reliable voters (despite educating young people). You gotta convince the boomers of voting for a future.
I hate this idiotic boomer generalisation. It has no foundation in anyway shape or form. It is just culture wars that people buy into. Yes older people vote more, but they have the same statistics when they were young as the young do now. They haven’t spent their whole lives voting selfishly. In the UK the only reason you have more boomers in the group is because the group is based on 18 years and not 15 like the other groups. When you average out how many are in each group by year they come in 3rd lowest. The highest is the gen X. By the time these people were 18 they were not even the largest group then. People die leave the country and other emigrate in. It is just a stupid fallacy people have latched onto.
Don’t call them boomers then. Call them people over 50 or 60… they are a majority demographic-wise. Younger immigrants can’t vote, so even asking young people to vote you still have a majority of old people that can vote.
America - where celebrities tell you how you should fulfill your civic rights, since Reagan times
ominous shit right here
You won’t be saying that when she tells her fans to elect her as president and to give her emergency chancellor powers to give herself unilateral control of the galactic senate.
God, are you one of the guys she dumped? 😂
So that’s how liberty dies. With thunderous applause :(
What a fucked-up world we live were people will do or not do stuff because celebrities tell them to, double fucked-up when the celebrities have to tell people to do what they should already have done :(
As I have already said, this should be part of our education system.
IMHO if children were taught Skepticism (the proper one, not the Denialism that some morons try to pass as Skepticism) we would end up in a much better world.
Germany promotes critical thinking in politics.
Can you imagine Beyonce? They would need new servers.
I just don’t understand why voter registration in the US is not a permanent thing like a driver’s license
It is, unless you move or have just never registered before. Since voting is optional, a lot of people probably just never register
It’s on a state basis.
It has to be renewed if you don’t vote within a certain time period in my state, for example.
Oh ok. Never ran into that issue
Depending on your state they can also purge the voter rolls and just unregister whomever they want at their whim. Ive had family members and friends get purged and, somehow, the notice that they were purged just magically never showed up in the mail, so they would go to vote and be sent away at the polls. As a result I have to manually recheck my registration before every single election. Each state is totally and completely different in this regard, you cant take any assumption from your home state and extrapolate it to others.
Not a great comparison since you have to renew your driver’s license
Fair… I should have said “social security number” instead
There’s your answer
I just hope I live to see a day when a grandchild asks me to tell them about how the Swifties defeated homegrown fascists and saved us all from the republican party and their enablers. I finally feel like the work is paying off and we can make some progress as a species, and for historians to remember Taylor Swift as the one who helped tip the scales it would make my day.
Good for her. People with fame should do these things with their power.
Commendable that she does this but sad that this is even necessary.
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