Sep 11, 2024 - Technology

How Taylor Swift's Harris endorsement is impacting the 2024 election

Hope King

photo illustration of a post by Taylor Swift on Instagram featuring a cat and with a caption that endorses Harris for president — This illustration photo taken on Tuesday shows singer Taylor Swift's Instagram post endorsing Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Photo: Pedro Ugarte/AFP via Getty Images

Taylor Swift's Instagram post endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris is now one of her most-engaging main grid posts of 2024 as of Wednesday night, according to an Axios analysis.

Why it matters: The pop star's massive reach (283 million Instagram followers) directly drove about 338,000 visits in 15 hours to the federal voter registration Vote.gov website, after she linked to her endorsement in her "Story" feature.

For context, the site received about 40,000 a day, on average, in the month leading up to Tuesday's debate between Harris and Trump, according to data from SimilarWeb.
But it's important to note that it wasn't immediately clear how many of the visits led to voter registration.

Zoom in: Less than a day after posting, Swift's endorsement gained more than 9.7 million Instagram likes and more than 1.5 million accounts had used the share feature as of 9pm ET.

A post from Feb. 4, teasing the release of "The Tortured Poets Department," has been the most engaged-with main grid post, attracting 19 million in combined likes and shares.

Zoom out: Winning Swift over had been a goal of President Biden's aides before he pulled out of the race, alongside broader strategies (within both parties) to use influencers to reach specific groups of voters.

And though she'd resisted wading into politics earlier on in her career, Swift's support of Harris was likely inevitable given her endorsement of Biden in 2020, the Los Angeles Times' Mikael Wood notes.

Between the lines: "It's not just the scale of Swift's success that makes her endorsement stand out this time; it's also her tone," Wood writes.

By signing her endorsement "Childless Cat Lady," she threw shade directly at Trump's running mate Sen. JD Vance, who has repeatedly criticized the judgment of politicians who do not have children.
It's "a kind of sneering flex we haven't heard from her before," Wood adds.

What we're watching: Outside of Swift's specific endorsement, political influencing through social media personalities comes with consequences.

When influencers distort political messaging in order to grow their followings, political parties moderate their policies in response to win independent voters, according to a study published last December.

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How Taylor Swift's Harris endorsement is impacting the 2024 election

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