Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris as her presidential candidate in an Instagram post published just minutes after the US presidential debate, saying the Democratic candidate is the “warrior” who fights for the “rights and causes” she believes in.
“As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can,” Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers late Tuesday, adding, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”
“I consider her to be a calm and gifted leader and I am convinced that we can achieve much more in this country if we are guided by calm rather than chaos.”
Swift also addressed AI-generated images Trump shared in late August that falsely showed Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign.
She said: “It really revived my fears about AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It made me realize that as a voter, I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election.”
Swift said she followed the debate and urged her fans to educate themselves on “these candidates’ positions on the issues that matter most to them.”
She captioned the post, “Childless cat lady,” a reference to comments made by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The photo that appeared with the post shows Swift with her cat, Benjamin Button, one of her three cats.
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In a 2021 conversation with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vance described senior Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy, too.”
Swift supported Democratic candidates in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2020, but had not endorsed anyone for 2024 as of Tuesday.
Asked about Taylor Swift’s support for Harris on Tuesday, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz said: “I love her songs, but I want to live in a world where liberals make my art and conservatives make my laws and policies.”
Part of Swift’s fan base had already begun mobilizing for Kamala Harris. The “Swifties for Kamala” coalition was officially founded in late August and raised more than $138,000 for the Democratic candidate at a virtual rally with Carole King and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand.
In her statement on Tuesday, Swift urged her fans to register to vote.
Harris’ running mate Tim Walz said on MSNBC that he was “incredibly grateful” to Taylor Swift, adding that “I say this as a cat owner, as a cat owner myself,” and that supporting her took courage, “and that’s the kind of courage we need in America.”
In 2012, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Maryland attempted to determine a connection, if one exists, between celebrity endorsements and vote counting.
They used Oprah Winfrey’s support for Barack Obama before the 2008 Democratic primaries to examine whether it had any influence on the polls.
The researchers concluded that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Obama was worth about a million votes. In the states used for the sample, he beat his main challenger in the primaries, Hillary Clinton, by about 270,000 votes.
