If Taylor Swift wants revenge on her haters, this is a good bet

(Julio Cortez/Associated Press)

If Taylor Swift wants revenge on her haters, this is a good bet

Opinion piece, Elections 2024

Kurt Bardella

February 9, 2024

The right’s unhealthy obsession with Taylor Swift has reached critical mass ahead of this weekend’s Super Bowl game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

We can put aside the strategic virtue of alienating a public figure who could single-handedly break the internet and focus instead on how Swift should get his revenge. And besides, if you think she doesn’t understand a thing or two about revenge, just listen to Reputation or ask Scooter Braun or David Mueller.

Taylor commands a social media army: 280 million followers on Instagram, 95.1 million beyond X23.9 million on TikTok, 80 million on Facebook and 56.3 million on YouTube. By comparison, Donald Trump has 23.7 million followers on the gram, 87.4 million further X24.5 million on Facebook and 2.8 million on YouTube.

The numbers speak for themselves.

And there is more.

a research conducted Last year, Morning Consult found that avid Swift fans prefer suburban, democratic and, unsurprisingly, feminine. They are usually between 18 and 39 years old. In the post-Dobbs political landscape, these are among the demographics President Biden needs most to pull off a victory in November.

So

While the obvious response to the MAGA hysteria might be to support Biden, something the president’s team hopes will happen, this isn’t Swift’s best move. She endorsed Biden in 2020. Another endorsement won’t move the needle.

Instead, the most effective

Taylor Swift

what she could do to influence the presidential election is use her celebrity, notoriety, and platforms to get her army of Swifties registered to vote.

A recent poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that, after record turnout in the 2020 election, only half of 18- to 29-year-olds who voted then plan to participate in the 2024 election. an NBC News poll found that young voters were souring on Biden. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed Biden losing the youth vote to Trump.

If this election is as close as the polls and prognosticators would have us believe, activating Swift’s army of fans could make a difference. Without openly supporting a candidate, she could launch her own voter registration efforts and send the right-wing MAGA sphere into meltdown mode.

Imagine if Swift announced even a handful of relatively modest acoustic concerts in the swing states (Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) where the ticket price was proof that you were registered to vote. Voter registration booths would be set up in front of the venue. The only problem would be dealing with the crowds.

In September, Swift’s voter registration superpower was on display. In an Instagram post, she pointed her followers to the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org, which reported an increase of 35,000 new registrations. In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, a post encouraging her followers to register to vote was linked to 100,000 new voter registrations in the 18 to 29 demographic. If this is the kind of engagement she generated from individual posts, imagine the impact of a swing-state tour in support of voter registration.

Trump’s MAGA army has made a crucial mistake by waging open war against Taylor Swift. She could very well choose to ignore them. To stay above the fray. To sell out stadiums worldwide in 2024 through the Eras Tour. To allow the conspiracy theorists to continue disassembling.

If I were Taylor Swift, I wouldn’t be rushing to give the MAGA world a response or reaction. Instead, I would let the campaigns unfold. Then comes fall, when it matters most, when MAGA has moved on, when everyone has forgotten the madness of the past few weeks, in a few strategic states that will decide the next election, maybe, just maybe, Swift should her get revenge.

Kurt Bardella is a contributing writer to Opinion.

@KurtBardella

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