Look what they made her do.
Taylor Swift, who is one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons and has an enormous following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris late Tuesday after Harris’ debate against former President Donald Trump.
The endorsement by Swift, delivered minutes after Harris and Trump had stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Harris an unrivaled celebrity backer and a tremendous shot of adrenaline to her campaign, especially with the younger voters she has been trying to attract.
“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
She signed her post as “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to comments made by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, about women without children. The photo that accompanied her post showed her holding a furry feline, Benjamin Button, her pet Ragdoll.
Swift’s endorsement was much anticipated among Democrats. The singer has expressed regret for not having done more to speak out about her opposition to Trump during his first run in 2016. Since then, she has embraced a more political posture while speaking out on issues such as abortion access. But the precise timing of Tuesday’s endorsement was something of a surprise: Swift endorsed Joe Biden on Oct. 7, 2020, closer to the election.
The impact of Swift’s endorsement may be hard to quantify, but her ability to get supporters to register to vote came into sharp relief just last year. In a brief post on her Instagram account in 2023, Swift encouraged her 272 million supporters at the time to vote and included a link to the website Vote.org.
The site later reported 35,252 new registrations that day, a significant jump compared with the previous year, and an especially significant spike in a nonelection year.
On Tuesday, Swift included a similar link to Vote.gov in her Instagram story.
In her post endorsing Harris, Swift also referred to her “fears” about artificial intelligence. She pointed to content generated by the technology that had falsely suggested that she supported Trump, which the former president promoted on social media. She underscored concerns that Americans would not know where she genuinely stood if she had not spoken out.
“It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
Trump has called Swift “liberal” but “beautiful,” and he has praised a friend of hers, Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, as well. Some fans of Swift had encouraged her to go public about her support for Harris to make a point of contrast after it appeared that Mahomes had liked one of Trump’s social media posts.
Swift, who has been a star musician spanning country and pop music for almost two decades, is one of the few celebrities with broad appeal and the ability to cut through a crowded media environment. Her romance with Travis Kelce, the star tight end for the Chiefs, has captivated the worlds of football and culture, and she is in the final stages of a head-spinning international tour that has sold out stadiums around the globe.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, dismissed the endorsement as “more evidence that the Democrat party has become the party of the wealthy elite.”
In 2020, Swift’s endorsement of Biden and Harris generated significant backlash from conservatives who urged her to keep her music career apolitical.
Four years later, her growing political involvement led to fevered speculation from Democrats about whether and when she would endorse Harris. Last month, some fans became convinced that she was signaling her endorsement by posting a photo of one of her backup dancers in silhouette that bore a resemblance to the vice president.
For her part, Harris has embraced pop music in her campaign.
Her rallies have had the feel of concerts as much as political events, with hip-hop stars like Megan Thee Stallion giving performances and DJs warming up dancing crowds of thousands before the vice president walks onstage to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom.” (Many Democrats had hoped that Beyoncé would perform at the party’s national convention in Chicago, but rumors of her presence turned out to be false.)
Biden’s rallies, in comparison, were small and low in energy, often reaching their peak of raucousness when a high school drum line played.
Polls show that Harris is doing much better with younger voters than Biden was, a crucial part of a resurgence in her polls that has allowed her to draw even with Trump. Swift’s backing of her campaign is a reflection of that appeal.
In making her endorsement, Swift added that she was “heartened and impressed” by Harris’ choice of Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, saying that Walz had been “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
Soon after, Walz appeared on MSNBC, where host Rachel Maddow read Swift’s endorsement to him in its entirety.
“I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift,” Walz said, putting his hand over his heart. “I say that also as a cat owner — a fellow cat owner.”
Swift has long pushed for her supporters to do their civic duty, posting a picture of herself in a long line on Election Day in 2016, a photo her fans thought was a cryptic endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
It was not until 2018 that Swift made her first formal foray into politics by endorsing a Democrat, Phil Bredesen, over a Republican, Marsha Blackburn, in a Tennessee Senate race. (Nashville is the nation’s country music capital, and Swift maintains a residence there.)
Blackburn won the race by more than 10 percentage points in the deep red state.
In an interview with Vogue in 2019, Swift indicated that she had wanted to be more vocal about supporting Clinton but had worried that her support could backfire. She said she had feared that Trump might try “weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement” against her and Clinton. Swift also shared concerns that public criticism of her at the time would be unfairly applied to Clinton as well.
Swift continued: “The summer before that election, all people were saying was, ‘She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar.’ These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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