Sept. 11, 2024 - How Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris matters

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It was the Instagram endorsement read ‘round the world: Pop superstar Taylor Swift backs Kamala Harris for president. Swift’s post also directed her followers to register to vote.

Swift’s support for Harris and voter registration will likely have some impact, but not as much as some would hope. That said, Harris and the Democratic Party are struggling with young voters and voter registration, so they’ll take any help they can get.

Let’s start out with what we know about Swift’s post. More than 330,000 people were redirected to Vote.gov from Swift’s Instagram, as of 2 p.m. Wednesday, according to the General Services Administration, which runs the website. An examination of Google trends revealed a spike in searches for voter registration after Swift’s post, a Washington Post analysis found.

We know there was an increase in registrations when Swift made a similar post imploring people to register to vote in 2023. Voter registrations went up by 23% that day compared with the same time the year before. That equated to 35,252 voter registrations in total nationally.

These really aren’t large numbers. Let’s assume that all of the people who clicked on Swift’s Vote.gov link have registered to vote. That would amount to about 0.2% of the 2020 turnout. Of course, only a portion of those who clicked on the link will actually register and then actually turn out.

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