‘Can Taylor Swift and Beyoncé swing it for Kamala?’ was the question this column posed a couple of weeks ago. Now, it’s the question being asked in every newsroom, political platform and social media site across the globe. Not least among a rattled Trump campaign team.
The trigger point, of course, Swift’s cunningly timed intervention moments after Tuesday’s explosive TV date between the two candidates for the most powerful job on earth. The sources who had assured me the cultural icon singer would be coming out in support of Kamala Harris insist the timing and substance of her move was entirely her own work, divorced from any PR advice. In itself testimony to Taylor Swift’s savvy grasp of PR and politics.
Voter registration
A crucial element of the 34-year-old megastar’s Instagram intervention was an appeal to visit the US government’s official registration site Vote.gov. Within a couple of hours, 337,826 people had done just that, and the numbers continue to rise.
It’s too early to fully assess how much the ‘Swift Effect’ (she has 283m followers on Instagram alone) had on the polls, especially in the seven finely balanced swing states that hold the key to the presidential election outcome. But it was significant she delivered it in accord with the Trump / Harris debate taking place in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, the state of her birth before moving to Tennessee and the biggest, most important prize among the key seven.
But it was the stiletto sharp style of her statement that unnerved pro-Trump pollsters and advisers, including her debunking of fake AI generated images of her endorsing Trump while clownishly dressed up as Uncle Sam that the former president had been too desperate or dumb to resist reposting as if it was genuine. Other AI generated fakes of her fans wearing T-shirts declaring ‘Swifties for Trump’ were reposted by some of the ex-president’s campaign team. Although not featured in her Instagram statement, Swift is also known to be outraged over Trump sharing a fake news item claiming her fans ‘are turning to Trump’ after a foiled terror plot forced the cancellation of her Vienna concerts recently.
Without once mentioning Trump by name (that probably offended him as much as anything) Swift, who made a point of saying she had just watched the TV debate, declared: “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos” and described Harris as a ‘steady-handed, gifted leader’.
By signing herself off as ‘Childless Cat Lady”, accompanied by a photo of herself with her pat cat, Swift artfully stuck the knife into Trump’s running mate JD Vance whose notorious reference to single women without children has outraged millions of female voters.
The Swift intervention apparently caught Trump on the hop when he decided to enter the debate spin room personally (never a good look for a candidate to do) to claim he’d won the debate even his own team privately admit he’d lost and to claim snap polls were showing him a ‘big winner’ when the opposite is true. He clearly hadn’t been alerted to Swift’s dramatic move and looked befuddled when reporters tried to quiz him.
Next day, talking to his favoured Fox and Friends show on the Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, Trump sourly warned: ‘She’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.’ His ally X owner Elon Musk chipped in with a characteristically controversial post, sarcastically suggesting: ‘Fine Taylor...you win...I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.’ That from the world’s richest man and father of twelve children by three women. ‘It’s an offer Taylor will find easy to decline’, quipped one of the singer’s close friends.
Inevitably, some of Trump’s campaign team later sought to portray the Swift intervention as a ‘contrived conspiracy’ between her and the Harris campaign. ‘It was probably scripted by the VP’s press team’, claimed one. It’s a claim strenuously denied by the Swift camp and the Harris campaign who, although always hoping for her endorsement, insisted they had no advance warning of her Instagram intervention.
One Trump strategist told me the Taylor Swift endorsement of Harris is a ‘real dilemma for us. Do we mount personal attacks on her hoping Republicans resent her interference or ignore her and hope the media interest dies and the voter awareness fades?’
Leading Republican pollster Frank Luntz branded Trump’s debate performance as ‘showing him at his very worst’, while one of the former president’s closest Capitol Hill allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, publicly branded it a ‘disaster’.
One senior Harris campaign adviser told me, ‘We’ve had jokes about Philadelphia being the famous location of all those Sylvester Stallone Rocky movies and the perfect place to deliver a knockout punch on Trump. Well, realistically, it was more a clear points win with Trump often on the ropes but we’re not fooling ourselves about knockouts, the polls are far too close. But Taylor Swift jumping into the ring the way she did was certainly an extra late punch in our favour.’
Huge influence
Metrics suggest, according to some researchers, that Taylor Swift has become the ‘most powerful musician of modern times and in a sense, a more potent influencer than any presidential candidate.’ Both campaigns are alive to a recent Newsweek poll that reported 18% of voters overall were ‘more likely’ to support a candidate backed by Swift with the figure rising to around 30% of the under 35s. Another poll by Morning Consult reported that half of her most avid fanbase are Democrats with the other half evenly split between Republicans and independents — and it is in the latter group that the Harris campaign are counting on Swift’s intervention on Tuesday night to secure their votes.
In another twist, a hastily produced Harris / Swift ‘friendship’ bracelet valued at $20 has already sold out and production being heavily ramped up fast ahead of the November 5th election date.
Amid the global media focus on the Swift Effect, one of the best insights features on the UK-based Tortoise website founded by former BBC News chief and Times newspaper editor James Harding. Headlined, ‘A league of her own’, it recalls how in 2008, Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama is estimated to have gifted him an extra one million votes and enabled him to beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination.
It’s worth noting, in Swift endorsement terms in 2024, as few as 30-40 thousand votes can make all the difference in some of the seven critical swing states. As one senior Democrat put it to Tortoise: ‘Taylor Swift’s endorsing Kamala is like putting a person on the moon.’
Quoting a Morning Consult poll conducted last year, Tortoise repeats stats that make for uncomfortable reading for the Trump campaign:
- 45% of Swift fans are millennials (30s to early 40s)
- 52% are women
- 53% live in suburban America
- 74% are white
- 75% have household incomes below $100,000
- 23% are political independents
In other words, many Swifties are the moderate suburban women (mums as well as daughters) who were crucial to the Biden victory in 2020 and who Harris needs to retain or hopefully expand, and Trump would dearly love to woo over. At just 34 years old, Taylor Swift is the right age to count first time voters and their mums (and, yes, liberal minded dads) among her massive fanbase.
It’s ironic that Donald Trump once considered himself a Taylor Swift fan and once told interviewer Ramin Setoodeh that he was convinced she ‘secretly likes me’ and asked the interviewer if Swift really was a ‘liberal or is it just an act. It surprises me, it surprises me that a country star can be successful being liberal.’
Setoodeh subsequently described Trump as being ‘absolutely fixated’ on Swift and reckoned he was so convinced of her secret admiration ‘because I think it’s too hard for Donald Trump to accept the fact that someone who is so rich and famous with such a huge platform would not support his candidacy... even Donald Trump knows the value of an endorsement from Taylor Swift.’
Maybe, then, he hadn’t remembered the 2020 Swift tweet that accused him of ‘stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency’. It was billed by some commentators as, ‘The Tweet That Could Help Take Down A President’. Coincidentally or not, six months later Donald Trump was out of the White House and in insurrection-invoking denial of election defeat. So, could Taylor Swift’s 2024 intervention now (and with Beyoncé confidently predicted to add her voice soon) slam the door on The Donald’s chances of regaining residence?
Meanwhile both sides are wrangling over a second TV debate. The Harris camp stressing their willingness while Trump, who had previously demanded there should be several, is now prevaricating, even telling Fox News he didn’t see the point because he ‘clearly won’ last Tuesday’s despite most of his own allies and the polls suggesting the opposite...
A senior Republican figure, insisting on anonymity, said: ‘The danger of a second debate is that Donald again won’t be able to resist airing old grievances, hurling personal insults at Harris and enabling her to outfox him by getting under his skin for a second time. He was urged to instead focus on policy ideas for 2024 not fight against the result in 2020 going into last Tuesday but went totally off message. There’s no guarantee he could discipline himself at a second debate and a repeat performance could clinch it for Harris.’
Update from Paul on 13 September:
On Thursday night, Donald Trump ruled out via his social media platform a second debate, complaining the first was rigged against him despite his original victory boasts. With his own campaign team split on the move, it remains to be seen whether Trump can really sustain that position.
For Kamala Harris and her team – who were publicly raring for another TV encounter – it represents a gift from their rival. They can hammer hard the message that Trump, who originally called for several TV debates, is "running scared" and has "retired hurt" after just one. The lines they'll incorporate into their campaign attack ads knowing it will also feature prominently in both the MSM and across social media.
But there was some good news for Trump with a post debate YouGov poll that showed him still well ahead on two of the biggest election issues, the economy and immigration. This despite the majority also thinking he lost the TV debate to Harris. Strange times?
Paul, who got to know Donald Trump personally in New York as Mirror Group US bureau chief and has long argued his unfitness to be POTUS, will also be contributing to the next September / October issue of InPublishing magazine, the last before the November 5th poll.
