September 12, 2024
Xavier Collin/Sipa USA
Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris after Tuesday's presidential debate, encouraging her fans on social media to register to vote. Websites with voter resources saw a surge in visits from the link Swift shared.
With a single post on Instagram on Tuesday night, Taylor Swift may have unlocked a significant pocket of young voters now motivated to register to cast ballots in November's presidential election.
The pop star's endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, a move many fans had urged her to make, included an Instagram Story with a link to the voter resources site Vote.gov. The website run by a pair of federal agencies serves as a landing page where people can access states' voter registration information.
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In the first 24 hours after Swift's endorsement, a spike in visits to Vote.gov was driven largely by the links she shared. More than 406,000 people clicked on the link during that timeframe, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration told the New York Times. That accounted for more than half of visits to the site, which had averaged about 30,000 per day in the week leading up to Tuesday's presidential debate.
Other voter resource websites saw similar bumps in traffic. The League of Women Voters, which operates Vote411.org, reported a shift in the demographics of people visiting the site. On Monday, the biggest age group going to Vote411.org was people between 55 and 65 years old. By Wednesday, people between 18 and 24 years old made up the majority of visitors.
Vote.org, another website that directs people to resources, saw the number of people it helped register to vote nearly triple form 8,865 per day in eight days before the debate to about 27,000 on Wednesday.
Although websites like these don't directly enable registration, they're an indication that Swift's influence combined with the debate led to a swell of political engagement at a pivotal moment less than two months from the election.
Pundits have questioned how much impact Swift's endorsement will have beyond the core audience of women who make up her most ardent fans.
"The one contrarian view I will say is that in this moment, the thing the Harris campaign needs perhaps the most is to figure out how to reach men," CNN correspondent Abby Phillip said Wednesday. "They've got to figure it out here in Pennsylvania. They've got to figure out how to reach Black men. And I'm not sure Taylor Swift helps them with that."
This isn't the first time Swift's encouragement has led to more political engagement. When she urged her Instagram followers to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day last year, Vote.gov recorded 35,252 new registrations, according to NPR. That was a 23% increase of the previous year and more than doubled the number of 18-year-olds who had registered that day in 2022.
At MTV's Video Music Awards on Wednesday night, Swift again mentioned the importance of voting while accepting one of the seven awards she received.
"If you are over 18, please register to vote for something else that's very important coming up: The 2024 presidential election," Swift said.
The Harris campaign showed its appreciation for Swift by selling $20 Harriz-Walz friendship bracelets, which had already sold out by Wednesday afternoon.
