Most celebrities are leftists. Or pretend to be if they know what’s good for them. Their endorsements or campaigning collectively may move the needle a bit, but they do it mainly by making a candidate look cool.
Obama used celebrity entourages very effectively. Bill Clinton did so to a more limited degree.
In 2020, Trump held a cinematic convention with lots of patriotic backdrops and speeches, while the Democrats went with a Zoom session packed with celebrities. Both conventions spoke well to their own demographics.
Taylor Swift, like most celebrities, already supported Biden in 2020. She’s bound to do it again. How much will that matter?
Not that much.
Her fake curated bestie online presence can’t do anything for Joe Biden. No matter what anyone does, Biden won’t be cool. His only campaign is anti, not pro, running against the threat of Trump. And that’s not really where Taylor Swift is much of an asset unless she decides to shake up her image.
Her fanbase mostly consists of millennial women. The kind who would already vote Democrat because their top two priorities are abortion and social justice. There Taylor Swift might help by boosting voter turnout. Maybe. I won’t sell the idea that Taylor Swift pushing mail-in votes to millennial women could make a difference, but it won’t change the outcome of the election. There will be too much going on for one celebrity to do that.
Most of the obsession with Taylor Swift reflects a hyper-saturated social media feed in which a single issue, event or personality is distorted completely out of proportion and rolled into every other story. That’s what this is. Taylor Swift is trending and so there’s a lot of resulting discussion about her and efforts to extend the trend by combining it with other major topics, like the election, for even more clicks, chatter and eyeballs.
You want to know what’s actually going to change the outcome of the election? Not Taylor Swift, voting rules.
Taylor Swift is a distraction. Secretaries of state, even if they’re in their 60s and can’t carry a tune, will make the difference. So will legal challenges, legislative actions and the other machinery of the election process.