Taylor Swift is my favorite sports team, and in 2023, she’s basically won the Super Bowl, World Cup, and World Series because she has gone from strength to strength. Just like a sports team, I will dissect her every move as if it were a play on the field and will engage with fans in critical discourse because it’s fun. I even play a fantasy football version of her Eras tour concerts called Swiftball. It’s a lot!
She is by no means above reproach (dabbling with Matty Healy was a fumble, to borrow a football term) but she is genuinely a fun team to follow. I (kind of) understand how rabid sports fans get now because following a team (or my girl Swift) is entertaining, provides a community to engage with, and there’s always something new to talk about. This is not to say I ever co-sign Swift’s actions, it’s just that she provides a lot of amusement and talking points if you’re paying attention to her. I mean, hell, I spent far too much time on Tuesday solving puzzles just to unlock her vault track titles from Google.
I bring this up because I’m about to share a staggering statistic that might be hard to fathom unless you understand that, for a lot of people, Taylor Swift must be their favorite sports team too because when she promoted voter registration on Tuesday, 35,000 people signed up to vote. Per ABC News:
Vote.org, a nonprofit and nonpartisan get-out-the-vote platform, said 35,252 people registered to vote using its platform on Tuesday, National Voter Registration Day — and the group attributed the spike in visitors to its site to Swift’s Instagram story post calling on fans to register to vote.
You may recall a large portion of the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana revolved around Swift breaking her silence around politics and coming out pro-Democrat with an urge to get out and vote in the 2018 midterm elections. I’m glad she did. Swift has the international spotlight in a chokehold right now, and clearly, people are listening to her when she says voting is important.
The Swiftie surge on Tuesday is the largest National Voter Registration Day since 2020. Per the above source:
Vote.org says that this was their largest National Voter Registration Day since 2020, and that on Tuesday it saw a 115% increase in 18-year-olds who registered compared to last year’s National Voter Registration Day. Overall, 157,041 eligible voters came to the site on Sept. 19.
While the Instagram Story that drove people to sign up is no longer live, ABC News has a transcript of it for you:
In Swift’s Instagram story on Tuesday, the singer-songwriter wrote, “I’ve been so lucky to see so many of you guys at my US shows recently. I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year!”
Swift linked to Vote.org’s platform in that post. The organization said that Swift has partnered with them for the past few years.
Yes, Taylor!
It’s nice when your team gets a win, and it’s even better when that win serves to help preserve American democracy, which—let’s be honest—is in danger in the 2024 elections with the presumed Republican nominee being Donald Trump and the GOP doing their best to shut down the government this fall. Anything that tips the scales into voter participation, especially younger voters who typically vote Democrat, is a very good thing indeed.
(featured image: Hector Vivas, TAS23 / Getty Images for TAS Rights Management / Kate Hudson)
