Can Taylor Swift Sway Voting in the 2024 Election?

Taylor Swift is arguably the most famous person in America, and while she's largely avoided politics, her stratospheric fame raises questions about whether an endorsement from the pop star could help decide the next president.

Exclusive polling conducted for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies found that 18 percent of voters say they're "more likely" or "significantly more likely" to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift.

Seventeen percent said they would be less likely to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, while 55 percent would be neither more nor less likely to do so. Of all the respondents, 45 percent said they were fans of the singer, and 54 percent said they were not. Only 6 percent said they were not familiar with Swift.

The survey, which had a sample size of 1,500 eligible voters, was conducted on January 18 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.53 percent.

"She's influenced popular culture, sports, the economics of entire regions of the U.S.," communications consultant James Haggerty told Newsweek. "So why not politics and elections?"

Media consultant Brad Adgate agreed. "Swift is in the class by herself," he told Newsweek.

"She's so talented and so popular and so ingrained in pop culture," he continued. "No one is close to her."

Newsweek reached out to Swift via email for comment.

Even though Swift has been making music for nearly two decades, she has reached an unparalleled level of celebrity in the past year. Last month, her wildly popular Eras tour became the first tour to cross the billion-dollar mark, she was named Time magazine's 2023 "Person of the Year," and her relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce has driven a massive increase in football viewership.

"Celebrity power in elections has grown because celebrity power itself has grown," Haggerty said. "Media and social media are now the central organizing framework of many Americans' lives. And in a world awash in messages, it's the celebrity voices that really resonate."

"In a world where a reality show star can become president—and maybe become president twice—all of this makes perfect sense," he said, referring to Donald Trump, who co-produced and hosted The Apprentice for almost a decade before his first presidential run.

Newsweek's poll found that an endorsement from Swift would have the greatest impact on younger voters. Roughly 3 in 10 Americans under 35 said they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate backed by Swift. Only 4 percent of Americans 65 and older said they'd be swayed by a Swift endorsement.

"Celebrities are deities in this young nation," public relations expert Richard Laermer told Newsweek.

In an election where the youth vote is expected to be key to winning the White House, Swift's influence is all the more important. The 2024 election will see 8 million potential new voters in the electorate, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. That means 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote in November.

Younger voters have typically voted for Democrats, and the voting bloc was credited with helping President Joe Biden win in 2020. But with many young people unhappy with Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war, Trump has been able to gain ground among them, further highlighting how critical the youth vote will be in 2024.

A New York Times poll from last month showed Trump up 6 points over Biden among voters under 30. In July, he had trailed the president by 10 points.

Although Swift is especially revered by young Americans, the actual impact of a potential endorsement is not known. Keir Keightly, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Western Ontario, expressed skepticism about whether the attention that celebrities can bring to an election translates into electoral change.

"We have an idea that celebrities have some sort of superpower over their fans that encourages us to perhaps overestimate how much actual mind-changing power celebrities have," he told Newsweek.

"You could argue that the rise of the Republican world came at the exact same time that rock artists were speaking out against the Vietnam War, against right-wing, conservative politics," Keightly said.

Swift wouldn't be the first celebrity to draw attention for endorsing a presidential candidate.

There is a long history of pop culture figures backing politicians. Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals famously cheered on John F. Kennedy's campaign. Willie Nelson had a close relationship with Jimmy Carter both before and after his presidency. And Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston and Cary Grant were all vocal supporters of Ronald Reagan.

Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was one of the most widely covered developments in that election cycle, and economists estimated that her support was worth over a million votes in the Democratic primary race.

A 2024 endorsement would not be the first time Swift has weighed in on political races. Although she's largely stayed out of politics, she endorsed two Democratic candidates for Congress in Tennessee in 2018 as part of her opposition to Republican Marsha Blackburn's Senate campaign. Blackburn went on to win her race, defeating Swift-backed Phil Bredesen with more than 54 percent of the vote. Swift's other candidate, Jim Cooper, won his House race.

"There's a historical case to look to, which is the Marsha Blackburn campaign. How did that turn out for Taylor?" Keightly asked. "People have endorsed candidates, and they lose."

He said people could mistake celebrity influence as being powerful enough to sway elections because of the level of emotion that these figures bring to their fans.

"We want to believe that they can sway it," he said. "We want to believe in the power of the celebrity, even though it's not clear that it actually translates into actual electoral success. There's a lot of wishful thinking."

Keightly said the real electoral power behind Swift is a larger movement that she and cultural phenomenons like the Barbie movie are a part of.

"It's a wave of feminism that is not just in the media and popular culture. It's a real thing that's happening," he said. "It's largely organized around ideas of girlhood and feminist girls becoming feminist women [that] are about to have a very strong demographic position in elections in the next 20 years."

Adgate said the most immediate influence Swift could have in an election would be to simply encourage people to vote. The singer-songwriter has already been successful at driving efforts to get out the vote. After she made an Instagram post encouraging people to cast ballots in the 2022 midterms, more than 30,000 people registered to vote through Vote.org.

"She'd be best to do a public service announcement that tells people, 'If you don't like the way things are going or are afraid of what's going to happen, register to vote," Adgate said.

Swift could face controversy for weighing in on the presidential race, he said, adding that while the election will be over in November, the 34-year-old's career has much further to go.