Taylor Swift performs at the Paris La Defense Arena as part of her The Eras Tour, in Nanterre, France, on May 9.JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP/Getty Images
And in the end, Taylor Swift couldn’t even deliver her hometown to the Democrats.
The pride of Reading, Pa., loudly endorsed the party’s presidential nominee with an Instagram post to her 272-million followers in September. That city, the fourth-largest in the battleground state with a 70-per-cent Latino population, was so vital to both campaigns that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stopped there on the eve of election day. But when the votes were tallied, Reading and the reliably red Berks County went for Trump.
In recent months, there was a real feeling that the Harris endorsement from Swift – along with those from Beyoncé, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, and a who’s who of the entertainment world – might actually mean something. Swift’s post piled up more than 10 million likes, and in the 24 hours afterward, vote.gov received more than 400,000 unique visitors. But those numbers were always immaterial, because they couldn’t show how many were voting-age Americans who hadn’t already decided their ballot. And those distracted by Democratic endorsers’ slick videos and brilliant smiles lost sight, once again, of a lesson of Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign: the party loses when it’s seen as hopelessly elitist.
So the outcome was the same as when Swift endorsed a Tennessee Democrat for Senate in 2018: the Republican won anyway. And if Swift – whose performances can move entire economies with as large a following as anyone on Earth – can’t move the political needle, can any celebrity?
The arguments that star power matters in elections will invariably cite a University of Maryland study that found that Oprah Winfrey’s public backing of Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries led to a million-vote swing. But 16 years after the study was published, it feels as current and useful as the first modern celebrity endorsement of a U.S. president, Al Jolson’s hokey anthem Harding You’re The Man For Us. Nobody in 2024 can claim to equal Oprah’s influence in 2008. Back then, when the monoculture was still alive (albeit on its last legs), streaming sites and social media were still nascent and consumption habits were far less fragmented, the media empress was more famous than even Swift, in relative terms.
Swift’s endorsement also lacked a surprise factor, which would’ve garnered it more attention. She had long telegraphed Democrat leanings, even when she was being criticized for not speaking out. For Oprah, the Obama endorsement was her first, and it came when he was the underdog; even then, it was only directed at Democrats deciding between two Democrats, rather than at a country choosing between two very different political visions. And while a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee experiment found that participants may have been more likely to vote for the then-senator, the endorsement “did not influence the extent to which participants held favourable opinions toward Obama or the extent to which they saw him as likeable.”
The simplistic thinking around celebrity endorsements is that they’re basically transitive – People like Taylor Swift, so they will like who she supports politically. But what really happens, according to advertising research, is that they can influence people in three psychological dimensions – cognitive (awareness), affective (emotions) and conative (triggers to act). But who needed any more awareness or more emotional reactions around the U.S. election? And tellingly, a 2016 meta-analysis found only mixed evidence that endorsements have meaningful conative effects – which is to say, actual ballot-box impact.
The better question might be whether celebrity endorsements have actually become an albatross for Democrats. Tinseltown’s broadly liberal sympathies have been a decades-long concern, catalyzed by Kennedy but probably originating with the 1940 “Hollywood for Roosevelt” effort (was there a safer bet in political history than throwing support behind a wartime president going for a now-unconstitutional fourth term?). But a general lack of star power became a badge of honour for Republicans in a campaign where the ballot question became who best understood the mythical “everyday American.” More Trump supporters actively disapproved than approved of celebrity endorsements, according to a July poll by Redfield and Wilton (30 per cent to 29 per cent) – to say nothing of the large percentage who didn’t care at all. That aligns with research showing that people are now moved more by social-media influencers than celebrities, because they identify more with vloggers and the Instafamous than the traditionally famous. The beautiful people who comprise and convey mainstream American pop culture now risk marginalizing themselves, their mass Democratic endorsements increasingly seen by millions as yet more proof of their – and the party’s – unrelatability.
Some celebrities are at least aware of these perils, though. In fact, in 2019, one A-lister reflected on why she didn’t publicly back the Democrats in 2016: “You had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, ‘I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you.’ I just knew I wasn’t going to help. … Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability?”
Wise words, from Taylor Swift.
This isn’t to say that fame isn’t a factor in American life – in fact, this election proved it matters immensely. The biggest celebrity had the biggest impact on the election, after all: Donald Trump, so thickly wrapped in decades of grimly accumulated renown that many see him as more symbol than man, allowing him to be perhaps the only elite who has managed to dodge the accusation of being one. He has become pure fame as he wields attention, that most fundamental American force. He is now both medium and message, celebrity and endorsement – the only one that we know mattered at the ballot box.
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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct details of two studies into the effects of celebrity endorsements on political outcomes. A previous version omitted a reference to a University of Maryland study.