Posted on 02/07/2024 6:06:34 AM PST by SeekAndFind
She’s just won the Grammy for album of the year.
She was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2023.
Her boyfriend is on his way to the Super Bowl.
Will Taylor Swift end 2024 as triumphantly as she began it — by tipping the presidential election?
Fans surge to register whenever Swift promotes voting, and she endorsed Joe Biden last time.
But it’s a fair bet most Swifties who care about elections are already on the rolls and included in polling; they’re not a swing constituency.
And while new registrations matter, every presidential election produces plenty of those.
It’s more likely that Swift hastens registrations among Zoomer women who would sooner or later participate anyway — driven by support for abortion or loathing of Donald Trump — than that she conjures a new demographic from apolitical music lovers.
Swift’s politics are simply too ordinary to make her a force for change.
Her views are fine-tuned to fit what her listeners (and peers in the entertainment industry) already believe.
What’s true of her music applies to her opinions; this is safe, mainstream stuff for the masses, or rather, since the masses and political consensus are a thing of the past, this is what a large but limited market wants.
Swift’s support for LGBTQ causes and service-sector labor unions and carbon offsets to combat climate change make her a safely conventional 21st-century liberal.
Indeed, it’s easier to profess these views than it would be to say nothing, since silence about gender or climate, like color-blindness in racial politics, is now deemed an actively right-wing stance by progressives.
In 2012, Swift told Time, “I don’t talk about politics because it might influence other people. And I don’t think that I know enough yet in life to be telling people who to vote for.”
She’s older now — but is she politically wiser, or just wise to the risk of remaining neutral when her industry and audience profile demand taking a side?
Left-of-center social and economic attitudes are, for Millennial and Generation Z women, the closest thing to not having any politics: They are the path of least resistance — and least reflection.
Significantly, Swift’s political passions stop at the water’s edge: She’s made no forays into Israel-Palestine issues, which have the potential to embroil her in real conflict with some of her audience and admirers.
As a celebrity in 21st-century America, Swift is second only to Trump, if that.
Yet she’s politically inert — though in many respects she’s Trump’s opposite number.
Trump’s base skews male, and his support among women is strongest with married women.
Male Swifties aren’t unheard of, but Swift’s lyrics about failed relationships with men are the bedrock of her appeal to a mostly female fanbase.
She’s the most famous woman in America today because, perhaps uniquely, she combines antithetical dreams and aspirations.
Swift is blue-eyed, blonde, beautiful, classically feminine in an age when beauty is supposed to encompass the widest array of body types and what it means to be a woman is open to question.
She’s Miss Americana — the homecoming queen dating the football hero who’s headed to the championship.
And although she’s sexy, she hasn’t sold herself as a sex object the way a Madonna or Cardi B has.
Swift represents quite a traditional image of happiness for a young American woman.
But she also represents a later feminist ideal — her songs are scathing about men, and she’s richer than her boyfriend.
She’s independent — yet still adheres to a midcentury archetype: feminist and feminine.
That’s a powerful formula, neither so restrictive that it repels teenage girls who want the freedom to define themselves nor so open-ended it leaves them lost in a maze of revisionist identities.
Men who like Trump don’t necessarily want to be him — especially if they’re conservative Christians — but they think the forces against him, or that he’s against, are the same ones against them: political correctness, globalization, a credentialist elite.
Those forces are against masculinity, too, as PC demands sensitivity, the economy turns labor unisex, and education favors conscientious girls and women over individualistic (for better or worse) boys and men.
The discontents of Trump’s male voters lend themselves to a political style, if not always an articulate program, and translate into a potent electoral force.
The Swift phenomenon has roots just as deep and equally entangled with sex and identity — but it’s based on a fragile contentment, not politically galvanizing discontent.
What happens when the two halves of Swiftism, feminist and feminine, are pulled apart by progressives’ attacks on the meaning of men and women?
Across the developed world, women are moving left while men are going right.
But it’s hard to see a place for the well-defined femininity of Taylor Swift in the future progressives are building.
For now, the Swifties lean left; tomorrow, when the consequences of progressive politics sink in, they may come to a new appreciation for the right.
Who does her boyfriend support?
Yes, she has. She credited him for giving her her first break. Don’t you read the Daily Mail?
Are “Swifties” old enough to vote?
I seriously doubt that Trump has a ‘Swift problem’. A high percentage of her followers are too young to vote, and a high percentage of the remaining will likely not vote for anyone. I’ve only been exposed to Swift’s ‘music’ once, and it certainly didn’t impress me.
It was at some kind of event during Thanksgiving weekend. We had it on TV for my 13-year-old granddaughter. Swift was sitting at a piano repeatedly mumbling the same phrases over and over and over again, badly out of timing with the music. It seemed to me like she was drugged. It’s hard to imagine anyone would vote based on anything he could say from such a drugged stupor.
I do interact with normal people, I have 2 daughters, I am well aware of who and what Taylor Swift is, but the lunacy that she’s the “secret weapon” for Biden is ludicrous.
Single women vote Democrat by and large, married women vote Republican by and large. Taylor is no more going to radically alter that pattern than San Francisco is going to be competently governed.
I’d rather Kanye then TS.
Folks are being rope a doped
You would rather lose and live in a shittier society than win and not vote.
You are proof of women’s illogical decision making.
Anybody dumb enough to listen to Taylor Swift on political issues is probably so stupod that they would be voting for Biden anyway.
It won’t be a problem if he ignores it.
There is no upside to attacking an icon like her.
Just let it go.
Even if she wins the Nobel Peace Prize, it still isn’t a psyops, because they would never lie to you.
The media constantly comes up with this worthless crap. A few years ago they were sounding the alarm that Oprah would run against him or throw her massive weight behind another candidate.....these are nothing burger stories.
N=2 is meaningless.
Young women, that wouldn’t normally vote, will vote.
That can be a difference.
Conservatives always vote.
18 year old women, not so much.
It’s so strange. She’s basically quiet but conservatives have made her a thing. I don’t understand why. I guess it’s she went into the football arena and conservatives would rather her not date a quarterback.
You need a link. Does she have time? She’s out of the country in Japan.
You are being rope a doped.
You are absolutely out of touch with trending.
Dems have been getting the younger folks to vote in higher numbers for several cycles, this isn’t something that is new, or going to drastically change with Taylor Swift.
The influence of pop stars massively effecting elections is nothing new... Don’t know your age, but go Google “Rock the Vote”.... or the “concerts” that democrat candidates have done over countless cycles to draw folks to their rallies... Sure it got attendance to their rallies but no, those fans who showed up didn’t all go walk lock step and vote for the Dem candidate.
Trump is up around 4-5 points nationally in head to head polling averages right now, as well as leading nearly every single swing state by solid margins as well. If you thing “swifties” are going to miraculously make that up, you are very very bad at math. Trump NEVER lead the national polling averages EVER in 2016 or 2020
You want to worry about something REAL, then you should be focused the fact that odds that Biden will actually be the name on the ballot in November is I think very very unlikely.
Stop being rope a doped.
As a kid, remembering how almost every celebrity was for McGovern, I thought at the time that Nixon had no shot of winning.
4.0 in Math curriculum. We can revisit this post election.
The people who obsess about a lib idol like her are the ones with the problem.
Girls 8-13 can’t vote best I can tell
A tempest in a teapot
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