In a rare moment of choosing to pick a political side of the spectrum (the only other palpably observable time being when she decided to take a stand for women everywhere by finally reporting the sexual assault that befell her in 2013), Taylor Swift urged her roughly 112 million followers on Instagram to not only register to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, but also to vote for Democratic Congressional nominees Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper.
Thanks to people’s “parasocial” relationships with celebrities (which essentially every American is guilty of having), it doesn’t matter that, like the rapport you likely share with your significant other, the dynamic is “only one-sided, [but] can be as powerful as interpersonal relationships. So Taylor saying ‘go vote’ can be like a friend telling someone to go vote.” Sad, as a certain orange one would say, but true. Alas, this information and power might have been much more useful in, say, early to mid-2016, when the reckoning was fast coming upon the U.S. and Taylor, with one endorsement–“Hillary,” or even, “Bernie”–might have saved the planet from another century of unshakeable misogyny (the electoral college even likely to become putty in her hands).
Was it just that Swift was not aware of or ready to harness her superpower of influence until now, or did she wake up one morning to the unavoidable sight of the apocalypse outside her own bubble characterized by a glittering pool with according blow-up swan universe? Surely not, as she already must have been aware of her unwitting power of endorsement when the luxury and designer pool toy scene started to pop off as a direct result of her Calvin Harris-included watery jaunt. But maybe she wasn’t ready to step up to the challenge, to take the inevitable heat that would come with commenting on something all too “real” (even though nothing really is).
Yet had she known that with just one forced emotional post she could cause “65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period,” maybe she would not have been so hesitant to at last speak. That she has given herself something of a get out of jail free card (a.k.a. attempt to avoid a backlash from her legion of conservative, neo-Nazi fans) in opting for the specificity of honing in on Tennessee as a result of it being her “home state,” therefore less presumptive in terms of making an overall grand political attachment to any one party, is classic Swift strategery (a word that we can thank fellow conservative George W. Bush for making usable).
Because for Swift to have so large a backbone as to have said outright in 2016, “Do not vote for this Cheeto with no prick,” would have been way too easy, way too helpful. She had to sit on her power long enough to use it against Kanye West as retribution before setting her sights more fully on the fraught and “end of days” political arena (also well-timed to dig a knife into West and his very unpleasant-to-watch fall from grace). But now that the score from that part of her life has been settled, she can focus on an even more important one: proving to everyone that accused her of not being political enough that not only is she well capable of being so, but that she’s also going to throw all y’all a diabolical curveball in endorsing two male Democrats. It’s her signature Swiftian way of rubbing salt in the wound by proving the point that she’s been well-aware throughout the shitshow, she’s just been biding her time in order to pick the most unexpected moment to weigh in and shift “the narrative she never asked to be a part of” (and was also still too busy being engaged in during 2016, therefore also likely a factor in her glaze over on the election).
And it’s a shifted narrative that clearly took the orange one himself by surprise as well, with him once more moronically commenting on celebrities’ actions with, “Let’s say that I like Taylor’s music about 25% less now” (which seems like a highly pertinent statement with regard to how much his attention is focused on governmental policy).
In the brief period following Swift’s liberal-leaning reveal, it was found that “during the entire month of August, there were only 56,669 new voter registrations. Swift beat that in a single day.” So yes, this whole time, it was likely Swift and Swift alone we could have turned to–despite and precisely because of her Aryan aesthetic–for salvation from Nazi America.
