Why It Matters So Much When Taylor Swift Speaks -- Previously “reluctant” to discuss politics, the pop star endorsed Democratic candidates—and the world listened. (Vanity Fair)

Taylor Swift has 112 million followers on Instagram -- she just gave a ringing endorsement of Democrats and could denounced bigotry and homophobia.

Why It Matters So Much When Taylor Swift Speaks

Previously “reluctant” to discuss politics, the pop star endorsed Democratic candidates—and the world listened.

by 

• JOSH DUBOFF

OCTOBER 8, 2018 1:51 PM

By Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.

On Sunday night, Taylor Swift posted an Instagram that essentially stopped the Internet in its tracks. The pop icon who had never been public about her political views (she posted a picture of herself heading to the voting booth in the 2016 election, without supporting either candidate publicly) endorsed Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, who is running against Republican Marsha Blackburn, a candidate President Donald Trump has enthusiastically supported. But she has now—as other previously nonpolitical celebrities have in recent years—decided to engage. Swift began, “I’m writing this post about the upcoming midterm elections on November 6th, in which I’ll be voting in the state of Tennessee,” Swift wrote in the powerfully worded, lengthy caption, posted below a black-and-white Polaroid. “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now.”

The post has more than 1.5 million likes as of this writing, including from onetime Swift “enemy” Katy Perry and friend Karlie Kloss (who is engaged to Jared Kushner’s brother, Joshua). Meanwhile, as one perhaps might have anticipated, the National Republican Senate Committee sent out a press release criticizing Swift, and Mike Huckabee felt the need to promise he was “still with #MarshaBlackburn.” The president has not weighed in yet, though that is presumably coming; he held a rally for Blackburn in Johnson City, last week.

Swift has a massive following—112 million followers on Instagram—and remains one of the most successful pop stars in the world, having just set the record for the highest-grossing tour by a female artist. Her Instagram post, like an exclamation point at the end of that tour, felt monumental for a reason. She didn’t just target her young fans, the newly legal voters who might be most influenced by her opinion. She chose an especially fraught political moment to speak up and make her most politically direct comment, without needing to mention Brett Kavanaugh or Trump (or even Kanye West, for that matter) by name; and her personal, thoughtful, and carefully chosen words seemed to push back at all of them, while still leaving some room for interpretation.

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In her post, Swift directly addressed fans who have turned 18 since the presidential election, explaining exactly how they can register to vote. She also seemed to anticipate potential qualms they might have, and even the demographic trend of younger voters identifying with neither major political party: “Please, please educate yourself on the candidates running in your state and vote based on who most closely represents your values. For a lot of us, we may never find a candidate or party with whom we agree 100% on every issue, but we have to vote anyway.”

Her fans are taking the message to heart, with many stating they will be voting nowwhen they weren’t planning to before. Swift has been, as usual, engaging with themon Tumblr and social media, as well, liking posts and memes they have created.

Her post is most directly timed, as she said, to the deadline to register to vote in Tennessee. But it also came the day after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn into the Supreme Court (Swift won a sexual assault lawsuit last year against a radio D.J. who had groped her and then sued her). And it also comes—as several have noted—just a week after Kanye West (whose career has, of course, long been entwined with Swift’s) wore a “Make America Great Again” hat on Saturday Night Live, and spoke in support of the president. The post found a way to wrap up multiple cultural “story lines,” which have been playing out in various degrees of magnitude over the past decade. It also arrives after Swift’s years-long media silence; with all the discussion about her by others, this is the first time since the end of the 1989 album and touring cycle that Swift has made a statement this personal and emphatic (though she has posted about gun violence and other causes, and spoken about the sexual assault case).

If there’s any precedent for this post at all, it’s her 2015 blog post directed at Apple, which had intended not to pay artists during a three-month trial period for Apple Music. (Apple switched its policy later that same day.) Swift told me at the time, “I wrote the letter at around 4 A.M. The contracts had just gone out to my friends, and one of them sent me a screenshot of one of them. I read the term ‘zero percent compensation to rights holders.’ Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter.”

The streaming-music debate is of course very different from politics, but Swift’s impulse here to craft and disseminate and direct and time a message in this way (who knows? perhaps this one was also written at 4 A.M.) seems similar. And if the immediate pushback from major Republican figures is any indication, it appears she has just as much power this time.