Sensemaker Daily
In 2008, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries, giving him a boost worth an estimated 1 million votes that helped him beat Hillary Clinton.
So what? That was like testing a rocket engine, says a well-connected Democrat who was close to the process. Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris 16 years later is “like putting a person on the moon”.
The impact of Tuesday’s Harris-Trump debate is still hard to gauge. As the candidates started talking, the national race and the contest for must-win Pennsylvania were both tied in polls. But it’s safe to say that 100 minutes later
- Democrats were relieved, verging on thrilled, to have seen their candidate find her footing and thump Trump as a “disgrace”;
- Republicans were acknowledging she’d done what she had to while Trump (“they’re eating the dogs!”) had not; and
- previously-undecided voters in focus groups were breaking, by big margins and small, for Harris.
And then Swift. The timing and wording of her endorsement – minutes after the debate and scripted as if by Harris’s staff – looked as choreographed as a Swift concert, but last night the Harris campaign insisted it came as a surprise.
Yeah, right. Celebrity endorsements don’t usually move the dial and they can be counterproductive if too liberal. But Oprah’s wasn’t and Swift out-influences her in demographics that are critical for Harris, in an election that could hinge on abortion rights and turnout. She has courted Swift so assiduously it’s hard to believe the Tuesday night announcement wasn’t intended partly to shore up her campaign in case the debate went wrong.
According to data from a Morning Consult poll last year:
- 45 per cent of Swift’s fans are millennials (30s to early 40s);
- 52 per cent are women;
- 53 per cent live in the suburbs;
- 74 per cent are white;
- 75 per cent have household incomes under $100,000; and
- 23 per cent are independents.
In other words, a lot of Swifties are the moderate suburban women (mothers as well as daughters) who Biden won in 2020 and who Harris has to keep on side to win in November.
Swift is scale. She posted her endorsement to 283 million followers on Instagram, where it quickly earned 9 million likes. It included a link to a voter registration page, where more than 330,000 new names were registered in 24 hours. “It matters,” the Democratic strategist David Thomas tells The Hill, especially in close states – and the seven most important battlegrounds are still on a knife-edge.
Swift is Pennsylvania. No-where is closer than Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes; tied in RealClearPolitics’ rolling poll of polls), and Swift was born there.
Swift is 34 – old enough to count teenagers and their parents as fans (and not just “girl dads” and moms but grown-ups in their own right). In the fight for voters in suburban Philadelphia and Pittsburgh it helps enormously that Swift is also white and not stridently party political.
Her endorsement post indicates it was motivated partly by AI pictures of her used by the Trump campaign, and by an aversion to “chaos” – but it doesn’t mention Trump by name. A Congressman she endorsed in 2018 says her intervention “completely transcends politics”.
No surprise, then, that Biden pursued her for more than a year before quitting the race. Gavin Newsom, the California governor, asked publicly on his behalf for her endorsement last September. No dice.
What’s more… The party didn’t get Beyoncé for the Democratic National Convention, confounding rumours that she might appear. No one’s ruling out Beyoncé swinging behind Harris now.
