Would an Endorsement From Taylor Swift Rescue Joe Biden’s Failing Reelection Campaign?
I Wish You Would
For the better part of 2024, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has wavered a bit, but most polls have consistently put it in the 37–40% range. According to a Reuters/Ipso poll taken back in May, Biden’s approval rating had fallen to its lowest point in two years. This was all going on well before the disastrous debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump on Thursday, June 27th, which prompted CNN’s John King to state that members of the Democratic party were beginning to ask themselves, “Should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside?” Despite what should have been an easy win against the recently-convicted Trump, the new debate format and a painful performance from Biden resulted in a post-broadcast poll conducted by host network CNN in which 67% of viewers voted that they thought Trump had won the debate.
In addition to Joe Biden’s handling of immigration, foreign policy and the economy, a chief concern of American voters in regards to his reelection campaign is the president’s age. Biden turned 81 years old in November of 2023, and will be turning 82 about two weeks after the 2024 election. This means that if he were to be re-elected, he would be breaking the record he set in 2021 for being inaugurated as the oldest president in history, a record which was previously held by Ronald Reagan (69 years old when inaugurated), and later Donald Trump (70 years old). Recently, when watching Biden give the 80th anniversary commemorative speech about D-Day, it struck me that Joe Biden is the first president since George H.W. Bush who was actually alive during D-Day. With Biden’s campaign frantically searching for ways to galvanize younger voters, questions about one key potential endorsement keep popping up — that of Taylor Alison Swift, the world’s biggest pop star.
On October 7th, 2020, Taylor Swift formally endorsed Joe Biden in his campaign for President of the United States against the then-incumbent Donald Trump. Speaking with V Magazine for their “Thought Leaders” issue, the singer-songwriter claimed that the prospect of a Biden presidency made her “believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs”. The move prompted the Biden campaign to share an image of Swift holding Biden-Harris cookies on Instagram, thanking her for her “support and for speaking out at this crucial moment in our nation’s history”.
As of the first presidential debate in 2024, Swift had not yet endorsed Biden’s reelection campaign, although as you can see below in a recent screenshot of Biden’s 2020 thank-you post, many people seem to not realize this. Since the beginning of 2024, countless media outlets from the U.S. and beyond have run numerous articles about the prospect of Taylor Swift endorsing Biden again, although they always make sure to clarify that it hasn’t happened yet, lest their own comment sections get overrun like Biden’s nearly 4-year-old Instagram post. Back in January of this year, UK publication The Telegraph wrote that Biden was “desperately seeking” an endorsement from the singer in order to “restore his support among young voters”.
Look What You Made Me Do
The fact that increased youth turnout helped Biden win against Trump in 2020 is a large reason why a second Swift endorsement is considered so important in 2024, as is the much-publicized claim from non-partisan organization Vote.org which credits a single Instagram post by Swift back in September 2023 for the registration of 35,000 voters. While Biden has yet to gain this supposedly game-changing re-endorsement, he hasn’t shied away from talking about it, even joking that it was a “classified” matter when speaking with late night talk show host Seth Meyers back in February — the exact same joke he made to Meyers when confronted about his age. The campaign even took it a step further by poking fun at right-wing conspiracy theories during the Super Bowl, where Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce played for the winning team, the Kansas City Chiefs. But these jokes and memes highlight a deeper divide between Biden’s staff and the voters they hope to court, a divide that the political and media classes don’t seem quite sure how to reckon with.
Conventional political thinking would suggest that because Swift has a large amount of young listeners, that if she were to endorse him again, young people in general would immediately follow suit. A 2023 poll by business intelligence firm Morning Consult found that 45% percent of self-identified Swift fans (or Swifties) are millennials. Additionally, according to analysis by market research firm YouGov (who have conducted 2024 election polling cited by CNN and other reputable outlets) back in March of this year, 29% of Americans “hold Swift in high esteem”, and two out of five of her fans are likely to “trust products recommended by influencers”. These data posit that most Swift fans are not only youthful, passionate and extremely active online, but also easily persuadable by what they see on social media. Taking into account the large number of fans, including 48% of American men, (according to YouGov’s findings and consistent with Morning Consult’s polling), Taylor Swift seems to be a rare uniting force in contemporary America, which often feels more divided than ever on just about any other topic you can think of.
So of course, if young, impressionable pop music fans saw Taylor Swift endorse Biden again, they would flock to the ballot boxes, correct? And they should also fall in love with the Biden campaign’s newfound sense of ironic internet humor, right? The thing is, even with Taylor on his side again, Biden would still have a lot more work to do if he wanted to convince young people he is hip and cool, let alone fit for another four years.
Another tactic that was employed by the campaign early in 2024 to sway young voters was to have Biden become the first ever sitting president to join TikTok, just before the Super Bowl. Biden’s first post was captioned “lol hey guys”, and featured him humorously answering silly questions about the upcoming game. Immediately, the comment section was lit up by users chastising the president for everything from his policies on the war in Gaza to his handling of the economy.
Since Biden joined TikTok, a few notable things have happened with the short-form video platform. In late April, the Democrat-led Senate passed a bill to ban TikTok from US mobile app stores unless the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance agreed to divest its ownership. This was the conclusion of a long-running investigation into TikTok and its suspected connection to the Chinese Communist Party, which reached a fever pitch when Republican Senator Tom Cotton aggressively grilled TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew about his alleged connections to the Chinese government, despite his repeated reminders to Cotton that he is Singaporean, not Chinese. Shortly after the bill passed in a landslide bipartisan vote in the Senate, President Biden signed it into law, less than 3 months after he had first joined the social media network. Biden’s administration claimed that it was necessary to pass the bill, as it had been lumped together with foreign aid packages for countries including Israel and Ukraine.
About 6 weeks later, Donald Trump joined TikTok, despite also attempting to ban it during his administration. Trump told NBC that he had flip-flopped on the issue because “Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people.” Facebook (along with Twitter) had famously banned Trump after the January 6th capitol riots in 2021.
Why would a 78-year-old and an 81 year-old-man both join a social network they had tried to kill? Because they’re both scrambling for the youth vote, and Pew Research Center published data late last year that claims that a third of young adults in US get their news via TikTok. Since Trump joined TikTok at the beginning of June, he has accumulated over 7 million followers, compared to Biden’s account, which had amassed just under 400,000 followers in the time between the 2024 Super Bowl and the first presidential debate. But Taylor Swift dwarfs both of them with 32.9 million followers on the app. She also has 283 million followers on Instagram (one of the highest counts of any musician on the platform), significantly more than both Biden and Trump, even if you combine the multiple accounts each candidate is linked to.
The Last Great American Dynasty
An often-repeated claim by older liberals and media figureheads about the 2016 election is that Trump only won because of low voter turnout amongst young people. While this was absolutely a factor, in reality it is only a small part of the equation. Youth turnout jumped significantly in 2020, but rather than any individual endorsement, most analysts would attribute this boost to Trump’s poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which arguably led to higher disease rates and poor protections for people who were out of work and/or school. To assume that another endorsement from Swift would magically fix the youth voter turnout issue, all of the following statements would have to be true: 1) COVID-19 was not the driving factor in increased youth turnout in 2020, 2) there are disproportionately large portions of young people in key swing states, 3) young people in those swing states are currently undecided voters and their numbers would be large enough to shift the election one way or another, and finally 4) those magical election-deciding young people must disproportionately be Swifties, and willing to do whatever she says.
Setting aside the complexities of voter demographics and the electoral college, the most concerning part of the Biden campaign’s thirst for Taylor is the notion that somehow a celebrity endorsement will do enough to assuage concerns about the fact that Biden frequently confuses the names of foreign leaders, consistently struggles to accomplish basic physical tasks, and most egregiously, is trailing in every major poll behind a twice-impeached convicted felon, one who is being visibly protected by an openly fascistic Supreme Court. The desperation in courting a pop star to repeat 2020’s win marks a shift in the Democratic Party establishment — no longer content with shaming young people for not voting, they are now committed to insulting their intelligence by assuming America’s sweetheart can carry America’s election, while its president rots away on the debate stage.
Both Trump and Biden have repeatedly made claims that if the other candidate wins, “democracy itself” will be at stake, and America will devolve into a shadow of its former self. There have been unprecedented mentions of this being the last debate we will ever get, the last election unless you vote for the good candidate. Even if young people were the problem, and not increasingly out-of-touch politicians or the incredibly outdated system of delegates that actually secures the presidency — can you really blame 20-somethings for not being excited for two the two oldest candidates in American history, both of which only preach doom and gloom? That is, when they are not comparing their golf handicaps.
Now That We Don’t Talk
One tactic that liberal news media outlets and the DNC have been employing to attempt to defeat Trump is to refuse to acknowledge him. They often don’t show his speeches on air, and they give little mentions to his own social app Truth Social, which some analysts claim has up to 2 million active users. Biden himself often refuses to call Trump by name, notably referring to him only as “my predecessor” during his recent State of The Union address.
And yet, according to Google Search trend data, after losing reelection, Trump has consistently been Googled in the United States more than sitting president Joe Biden. The graph below shows the amount of times the terms “Joe Biden” and “Donald Trump” have been searched between Biden’s inauguration and the June 27th presidential debate. Conveniently, the colors here correspond with each candidate’s party.
As a suppression tactic, keeping Trump’s antics largely off of networks like CNN and MSNBC has worked about as well as the United States government and their “war on drugs”. Still, liberals seem to believe that if they plug their ears and act like they can’t hear him, Trump might just go away. This appeared to backfire spectacularly during the debate, where the new rules meant to curb Trump (no audience, muted mics and lack of live fact-checking) actually made him seem like a more conventional politician, instead of the fire-breathing demon that Joe Biden once had the pleasure of telling to “shut up” on live television — much to the glee of moderate liberals around the world. By removing his ability to interrupt and garner whoops and hollers from his loyal cult of supporters (terms which were set by the Biden camp), the Democrats and CNN took away the very things that made Trump so visibly unappealing to undecided voters 4 years ago.
You know who else has a hard time talking about Donald Trump? Our queen, Taylor Swift! In fact, she generally doesn’t speak about any candidates, once famously telling Time Magazine that she didn’t “talk about politics because it might influence other people”. Shortly before the GOP and DNC conventions certified their candidates in 2016, an online faction of white supremacists began to tout their love of Swift, who they believed represented the perfect aryan pop star and would serve as the new gold standard for entertainment in the Trump era. Taylor Swift (understandably) refused to comment on this trend, but her silence on the issue only allowed it to fester. Many of these Trump supporters and/or neo-Nazis even pointed to her hush on political topics as evidence that she was somehow part of their movement.
Slowly, over the years, tiny pieces of Swift’s opinions on Trump and politics began to trickle through. In 2018, she made her first ever political endorsements, for Tennessee Democrats Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. In 2019 she made her most anti-Trump statement yet (nearly three years after his election), by claiming that he was “gaslighting the American public”. And of course in 2020 (but not yet in 2024), she endorsed Biden, saying “the change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included.” Immediately the very people who once believed she was covert Trump operative decried her as being in cahoots with “the deep state”, and claimed what they viewed as a heel-turn from their aryan princess was part of a larger “political psy-op”. These conspiracy theories have hardly slowed down to this day, with some of the more fringe conservatives believing that her relationship with Travis Kelce is all part of the plot to get Biden re-elected.
Make no mistake about it — Taylor Swift’s political agnosticism is just as appealing to the Democrats as is the fact that she was the first female artist in history to hit 100 million listeners on Spotify. Just as Republicans actively push conspiracy theories to dog-whistle to intensely bigoted supporters, the Democrats still hang on to a feeble and futile idea that cross-aisle cooperation is possible in a post-Trump American political landscape. It’s why Biden decided to call his infrastructure bill (one of the greatest accomplishments of his tenure) the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” instead of stamping his own name on it, as Obama smartly did with Obamacare. This decision has already proven to haunt him, as he has been on the back foot all campaign attempting to defend his record, while the very people he claims to be able to work with have been actively sabotaging him at every chance possible. So if Biden and his stand-for-nothing dems can’t prove to America that they represent solidarity, their last and best hope seems to be an endorsement from the most milquetoast, inoffensive and neutral white female pop star they can find. The very same pop star who is so far unable to respond to Trump claiming it would be “disloyal” of her to side with Biden again.
I Hate it Here
Taylor Swift will not rescue Joe Biden from the pit he and his cronies have dug for themselves. Just as putting Jill Biden on the cover of Vogue will not stop Project 2025. Decades of actively crushing any hope of a progressive movement within the DNC cannot be undone by a celebrity endorsement from a singer who actively avoids talking about politics for fear of alienating any part of her historically massive fan base. And yet, they will not stop trying to get her back on their team. The center-right establishment Democrats have hardly evolved or learned anything after their crushing defeat in 2016, in which they were so mystified that Hillary Clinton couldn’t win over black voters by claiming to carry hot sauce with her at all times, that their only answers were to blame Russia (and American millennials). If you look at Joe Biden’s TikTok page, the pandering is maybe not quite as abrasive, but the meme profile picture, Charli XCX references, and constant use of emojis make it quite clear that they think this is a viable path for actually reaching young people, and swaying them to their side. If Biden loses this election, as just about every poll seems to predict, these tone-deaf posts and marketing tactics will age about as well as he has in the past four years.
But it’s not just that Biden is old. He was old when he was Obama’s VP, he was old when he won against Trump the first time. Hell, when he passed his infamous 1994 Crime Bill, he was 51 years old, four years older than Barack Obama was when he was elected president for the first time, 14 years later. Currently, he is a full decade older than John McCain was when he ran against Obama in 2008. The fact of the matter is he is Biden isn’t just old, he’s slower, feebler, and less coherent than he was when he was when he first debated against and eventually defeated Donald Trump. And lest people forget, Joe Biden was never a great public speaker to begin with. 13 years ago, during the same White House Press Correspondents Dinner that Seth Meyers famously roasted Donald Trump, the comedian also made the joke, “What can I say about Joe Biden that hasn’t already been said incorrectly by Joe Biden?”
There is still time to make a change. Already, Biden has been back on the campaign trail, demonstrating about 150% more vigor and competency than he did during his abysmal debate performance. If he were to keep up this intensity, perform dramatically better in the second debate currently scheduled for September, and get that all important endorsement from Tay-Tay, then things might turn around. Alternatively, if Biden were to step aside as so many are calling for him to do, and the DNC put forth a new candidate — be it Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro or literally any candidate who was born after the invention of the V2 rocket — and that new candidate had a Taylor Swift endorsement right out the gate, that could also shift things massively… Maybe. More pragmatically, if the Biden campaign wants to effectively utilize female pop stars (Swift or otherwise), they could have them go out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and talk about the issue that actually has the most potential to win over young women — reproductive rights. In any case, we all have a long, cruel summer ahead of us.
