This Election Actually Is About Taylor Swift
5 min read
Taylor Swift has been an outspoken Democrat for some time now. After publicly regretting that she’d not campaigned against Donald Trump in 2016, she endorsed liberal candidates in Tennessee in 2018 and baked Biden-themed cookies in 2020. In some ways, her endorsement of Kamala Harris, posted to Instagram after last night’s presidential debate, is no surprise. But in 2024, she’s more than just another entertainer voting blue. She is the celebrity who best encapsulates the tensions that this particular election seems to be coming down to: the reality of, and backlash to, feminine power and independence in America.
The effects of endorsements are never simple. Famous people really can drive donations and enthusiasm; in 2018, Swift spurred a record surge in new-voter registrations by posting a link to Vote.org. But celebrities can also anger and annoy people—meaning that an endorsement from a controversial entertainer, one disliked by a crucial voter demographic, may be worse than no endorsement at all. An NBC poll from last November found that only 16 percent of voters have a negative view of Swift. Since then, however, many Republicans have made a concerted effort to raise that number. One Trump surrogate told Rolling Stone about waging a “holy war” against Swift, which seems to be an effort to portray one of the most famous people on Earth as a product of elite conspiracy against malekind.
Part of the way that conservatives have demonized Swift is familiar: Right-leaning figures such as Fox’s Jesse Watters and the presidential-primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have suggested that her fame is astroturf, a “psyop” to seed liberal ideas. Feverish as that idea may sound, it plays into a classic tactic of treating pop culture as a propaganda effort by “Hollyweird” (rather than the cumulative efforts of artists and corporations pandering to authentic public sentiment). Such attacks seek to invalidate the political relevance of basically all entertainers, offering cover to Trump supporters who like to hum along to “You Belong With Me.”
Another attack line was nastier, and more calibrated to now. One manosphere podcaster commented on Swift’s Person of the Year Time cover by saying, “It’s shameful and sad that a hyper-promiscuous, childless woman, aging and alone with a cat, has become the heroine of a feminist age.” Another, Charlie Kirk, asked his fellow podcasters whether Swift had any eggs left. Such rhetoric might once have seemed the provenance of a chauvinistic fringe, yet in 2024, the Republicans chose a vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, who has openly mocked “childless cat ladies.” The GOP clearly hopes to exploit the growing gap in political leanings between men and women. So while Democrats count on pop stars—who pack stadiums with straight women, their boyfriends, queer folks—Republicans focus on video-gaming streamers and podcasters who hawk testosterone-boosting supplements.
Swift is a perfect bogeywoman in that effort. Her cats appear in her music videos, her lyrics, and, indeed, her Time cover shoot (which generated the photo she posted with her endorsement message yesterday). More important, her music is about the state of being female, unmarried, and childless. Over the years, her songs have portrayed her as a bright-eyed romantic searching for The One but continually getting disappointed by men—shifty playboys or taciturn sad sacks—who don’t meet her standards. Sometimes she’s defiant about not buying into “the 1950s shit they want from me,” as she sang in 2022. But on this year’s track “The Prophecy,” she sounds fearful, heartbroken about the idea that she might end up conforming to the trope of the spinster. Quite clearly, this anxious push-and-pull—between what she wants, what she gets, and society’s judgment—is humanizing and relatable to her millions of listeners.
Trump himself has baited her from another angle. In comments published in a 2024 book about The Apprentice, he wrote off Swift’s political views but offered this unsolicited compliment: “I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful!” Later, he reposted AI-generated images that appeared to show her endorsing him. These actions may seem like random nonsense, but they also, with almost uncanny precision, insulted some of Swift’s publicly held ideals of self-determination and dignity.
In an industry that has so often reduced women to their appearance, Swift has long made a point to assert herself as a songwriter, thinker, and businessperson. In 2017, she won a lawsuit against a radio personality who had grabbed her without her consent; she asked for only $1 in damages, thereby emphasizing her verdict’s symbolic implications. Earlier this year, when pornographic deepfakes of her circulated, someone in Swift’s camp told the Daily Mail that the images were “abusive, offensive, exploitative,” and her fans worked to bury the images. Though many states have criminalized the leaking of nude photos, the contretemps suggested that AI, futuristic as it seems, could be a regressive force. Big Tech, it seemed, was playing a role in conservative efforts to roll back women’s rights, including control of one’s own image. (On cue, Elon Musk posted a dirty joke about Swift’s endorsement last night.)
All of this context can be seen in Swift’s statement cheering Harris’s campaign. She mentioned Trump’s posting of AI images—invoking “the dangers of spreading misinformation”—and she signed off as “Childless Cat Lady.” She praised Harris as a “steady-handed, gifted leader” and Tim Walz for supporting “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.” But for the most part, as my colleague Helen Lewis noted, her endorsement message was sober and understated. It mostly just urged fans to do their own research and register to vote. The neutral tone cut against caricatures of liberals as ever-triggered and hysterical. Perhaps it was also designed to throw cooling water on the gender wars.
Swift, after all, is not known for going easy on her enemies. She sings about “dressing for revenge,” and she’s in the process of rerecording her albums in order to settle a score with her nemeses in the record industry. As the right has antagonized Swift over the past year, I’ve imagined that she might bring some fury to the race. But Swift isn’t fully taking the bait, so far at least. She’s feeding into the Harris campaign’s effort to project an air of upbeat calm, and in doing so sending a message: Swift’s version of womanhood is status quo, normal, unremarkable. Getting worked up about someone for being successful, having opinions, and owning cats is, however, weird.
