Newsweek Poll: Swift’s Influence Could Impact Presidential Election

Few have doubted that pop music megastar Taylor Swift rose to cultural icon status in the past year.

Her Eras Tour was the first concert tour to pass the billion-dollar mark. She was named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year, and her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce not only elevated the NFL’s female viewership but reportedly created a brand value of $331.5 million for the Chiefs and the league.

Although Swift has largely stayed out of the political fray – she endorsed two Democratic candidates for Congress in Tennessee in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020 – a new poll conducted for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies found that 18% of voters said they’re “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift.

The poll was taken Jan. 18 among 1,500 eligible voters, with a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points. It found 17% said they would be less likely to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, and 55% would be neither more nor less likely to do so. Of the 1,500 respondents, 45% said they were fans of Swift, and 54% said they were not. Just 6% said they were not familiar with Swift.

“She’s influenced popular culture, sports, the economics of entire regions of the U.S.,” communications consultant James Haggerty told Newsweek. “So why not politics and elections?”

“Swift is in the class by herself,” media consultant Brad Adgate agreed told Newsweek. “She’s so talented and so popular and so ingrained in pop culture. No one is close to her.”

Swift has a lot of pull with America’s youth, and the youth vote is expected to be crucial in this year’s election, where 8 million potential new voters will be joining the electorate, according to data the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. That means 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote in November.

Younger voters have typically voted for Democrats, and the voting bloc was credited with helping Biden win in 2020. But many young people are unhappy with Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, Newsweek reported, and Trump has been able to gain ground with them, further emphasizing how crucial the youth vote could be this year.

Keir Keightly, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Western Ontario, is skeptical about whether the attention that celebrities can bring to an election translates into electoral change.

“We have an idea that celebrities have some sort of superpower over their fans that encourages us to perhaps overestimate how much actual mind-changing power celebrities have,” he told Newsweek. “You could argue that the rise of the Republican world came at the exact same time that rock artists were speaking out against the Vietnam War, against right-wing, conservative politics.”