The youth voter registration fire Taylor Swift helped light after endorsing Tennessee Democrats running for Senate and House seats and urging her fans to vote is getting bigger:
- Voter registrations among young Americans shot up in the wake of pop megastar Taylor Swift's Instagram post urging her 112 million Instagram followers to get out the vote.
- Vote.org says nearly 65,000 Americans ages 18 to 29 registered to vote in the roughly 24 hours after the singer-songwriter's social media rallying cry.
- By noon on Tuesday, that number grew to more than 102,000…
- That surge in young registrations far exceeded the combined total of every other age group in the roughly 48-hour time period, in which about 64,000 Americans ages 30 and up registered….
In Swift's home state of Tennessee, registrations in just the first eight days of October have already blown past every other month in 2018. More than 5,000 Tennesseans registered in October by Tuesday at noon, more than twice as many as the next-highest month of September, which saw 2,811 registrations.
The spike placed Tennessee as the state with the ninth-highest numbers since Sunday, with 6,217 registrations overall. Texas, which has roughly four times the population of Tennessee, took the top spot with 31,307 registrations.
This comes at an especially critical moment. Of Democratic Senate candidates who are currently behind their Republican opponents in the polls, Bredesen (the Tennessee Senate candidate Swift endorsed) is closest to catching up. If Bredesen wins, he is very likely to be our 51st Democratic Senator, and this endorsement might just push him over the finish line. Taylor Swift is the hottest pop star of her generation. She has tremendous influence over the younger generation that is normally least likely to vote, and that is most overwhelmingly Democratic. Because of her her southern country music roots and the care she took to never reveal her political opinions prior to today, she has a massive, fiercely devoted fan base in the red states where we need the most help, especially her home state of Tennessee, where she has promised to vote. And the numbers above are just from one voter registration website—it doesn’t count all the voter registrations that are happening through other organizations or just with voters registering themselves directly.
And Political Taylor is here to stay! She is doubling down on her political turn, and making use of every opportunity to encourage her fans to vote. As it happens, she won Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards yesterday, a day after she broke her lifelong political silence to post a passionate endorsement of Tennessee Democrats and voter turnout in general. When she won the award, she didn’t let that opportunity to amplify her message go to waste, and concluded her acceptance speech by saying, “I just wanted to make a mention of the fact that this award and every single award given out tonight were voted on by the people And you know what else is voted on by the people is the midterm elections on Nov. 6. Get out and vote.” Uproarious applause and cheers followed. What a graceful way to celebrate the spirit of the American Music Awards while simultaneously reinforcing her political message to her fans.
The beautiful thing about Taylor’s political messages is how vulnerable, honest, and authentic they sound (just like her songs), how they highlight aspects of the Democratic platform that really appeals to her generation, and how pragmatic it is in their call for her fans to vote for the candidate who best reflects their values even if they don’t agree 100% with that candidate. She is a powerful voice of her generation that can speak (sing) for and to them in ways few others can.
I’ve always liked Taylor the musician, but I like Taylor the voter turnout generator even more!