According to Politico, the Democratic Party hopes that three performances by music megastar Taylor Swift will attract young people to the polls come November.
Swift is scheduled to play three consecutive gigs in Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium in October, two weeks before the November election. While Swift has not backed any candidates or spoken about the election, she did endorse Biden in 2020, and the president’s campaign staff is apparently hoping to secure an endorsement from the pop diva before November’s fight with Trump.
Democrats are preparing voter registration campaigns at her shows and, according to Politico, have contacted Swift to persuade her to “use her Miami concerts to talk about issues affecting the rights of young people in Florida.”
“It’s so close to the election, and we hope that there’s a message included to encourage folks, especially her fans, to go vote,” said 27-year-old Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost. “We need the help.”
Florida’s Democratic Party has been waging a losing battle for a decade. Once a swing state where voters consistently leaned towards the eventual presidential victor by the slimmest of margins, Florida has progressively tilted more Republican since Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016.
Despite his loss in the presidential race, Trump garnered more votes in Florida in 2020 compared to 2016. Governor Ron DeSantis, too, transformed his 0.4% victory over Andrew Gillum in 2018 into a resounding 60-40 win against Charlie Crist in 2022, marking the widest margin in a Florida gubernatorial election since 1982.
Presently, there are nearly 800,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida.
Jayden D’Onofrio, chair of the Florida Democratic Party’s Youth Council, sees potential in Taylor Swift’s predominantly Gen-Z fanbase to reverse this trend if sufficiently mobilized to vote. “People resonate with her. They grasp her significance. She epitomizes youth,” he conveyed to Politico, noting that party members would be deployed to all three of her concerts to engage potential voters.
In addition to Swift, Democrats are capitalizing on her association with NFL star Travis Kelce, intending to host voter outreach events across the state when his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, face off against the San Francisco 49ers in this weekend’s Super Bowl.
While some liberal commentators mock suggestions of using Swift as an election-year “Psyop,” her popularity presents a potentially formidable asset for President Joe Biden. Approximately 53% of Americans identify themselves as Taylor Swift fans, and as reported by the New York Times, a solitary social media post by Swift resulted in the registration of 35,000 new voters in the US last year.
