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Taylor Swift attends the 66th Annual Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 4, 2024. © Jim Ruymen/Imago
Joe Biden is lacking momentum in the election campaign.
He can use any help in the expected duel against Donald Trump.
Does it come from a pop star?
Washington, DC - Last Thursday (February 1), five Democratic staffers sat in a leather booth at a dive bar on the east side of Capitol Hill, drinking beer and white wine, discussing the latest political drama that had unfolded around their idol.
“I want one person to act normal and treat her like a human being,” one of them said of Taylor Swift.
“All the MAGA people were super annoying this week,” said another.
After almost 90 minutes, one dared to ask out loud whether Taylor's relationship with her football-playing boyfriend Travis Kelce was actually a publicity stunt.
The others screamed.
“We’ve been here for an hour and you’re just saying that now?”
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The women are part of the Hill Swifties, a group chat of congressional staffers who idolize the pop star and occasionally express their enthusiasm at work by including Swift references in their bosses' press releases.
Or conversely, dissuade these bosses from publishing embarrassing Taylor content.
After all, it's easy to become ill-acquainted with Swiftisms in Washington.
The State Department's Eras Tour-themed international travel checklist?
That was good.
The FBI's tweet, disguised in the aesthetic of Swift's album Speak Now, urging people with "information about a federal crime" to "speak now"?
Not so good.
Swift fans allowed The
Washington Post
to join their conversation on the condition that their names not be used so that no one would confuse their personal views with those of their bosses.
"Thank God we have Taylor Swift," one Hill Swiftie joked about her obsession with the pop star, "otherwise I'd be wondering if I was joining QAnon."
The employees have been fans of Swift almost as long as they've been alive.
Certainly longer than they have been involved in politics.
Could Taylor Swift help US President Joe Biden in the election campaign?
It's a particularly heady time for Swifties in Washington.
Her recent appearance at one of Kelce's games — a playoff win that sent his team to the Super Bowl — coincided with rumors that President Biden's campaign might be courting her support.
These developments had sparked several days of excitement about what, if anything, Swift could mean for 2024 politics.
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On the left: an open thirst for Swift, a vocal advocate for women's and LGBTQ+ rights whose well-known views generally align with Democrats, to begin their Dark Brandon era.
On the right: Speculation that Swift and her "vaccine shill boyfriend" - a reference to Kelce's promotion of the coronavirus vaccine - are engaging in a "psyop" (short for psychological operation) to win the US election for Biden .
Swift has kept herself out of the story: She has not commented publicly on the endorsement talk, and a rep for Swift did not respond to a request for comment.
The Biden team is tight-lipped about a Swift strategy: A campaign and White House spokesman declined to comment on Swift-specific measures.
“I have no idea whether Taylor Swift would actively offer herself or not, but of course he would be happy to have her support,” said Mitch Landrieu, a co-chair of the Biden reelection campaign, who said he loves Swift and also Beyoncé.
It's unclear how much the president, who is a fan of Irish folk music, knows or cares about Swift, whose name he appeared to confuse with that of Britney Spears at last year's presidential turkey liberation.
The task of educating the president has been taken on by his die-hard Swiftie employees.
On a day that music executive Scooter Braun visited the White House, former Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield accidentally informed the president of Swift's bad blood with Braun over control of her master recordings.
As Biden's team prepared the president for the upcoming meeting in the Oval Office, Bedingfield spoke up.
"I said, 'Sir, this is the brief I was born to do,'" she says.
A clear endorsement of Biden's re-election by Swift could be important, Bedingfield says, especially for her fans who aren't as interested in politics.
"Since she's told us - the public - how she feels about certain issues, I think it would be more important for her to say, 'There's a lot at stake here in this election, and that's why I'm going for Joe Biden and Kamala.' Vote for Harris and I hope you do too,'” Bedingfield said.
Support from Taylor Swift could be important for Biden
Bidenworld has been flooded with suggestions on how to get an endorsement from Swift - from the person who claimed she had a secret plan with her lawyers that would soon be passed on to Swift's lawyers to the person who claimed her brother played on the same basketball team as Swift’s brother in Pennsylvania – a swing state!
– and maybe that could be a starting point.
Supporters regularly send their supporters the latest paparazzi photos of Swift and her friends out on the town - just in case anyone knows someone who knows someone who knows Swift!
Biden's team was particularly upset when a well-meaning supporter's suggestion that Biden just come to a Swift concert made the news.
The logistics alone — Secret Service, shuffling concertgoers through security — would cause the kind of headache that could anger the very Swifties they're trying to woo.
Because anyone who knows how Swift operates knows that any meaningful support of Swift must be authentic and on her terms.
“Don’t try it,” warned a Hill Swiftie in a bar on Capitol Hill.
“She does these things herself depending on what side of history she wants to be on.”
Taylor Swift hasn't spoken about politics for a long time
Once upon a time, a few years ago, Taylor Swift was a teenage country music star who never, ever, ever talked about his politics.
It was left to the obsessed fans to glean what they could from her texts and social media posts.
"There was a whole segment of the fan base that was examining their old posts to find out who their friends were and if they had said anything political," says Lauren Lipman, a Taylor Swift influencer who writes about the issue on her YouTube channel Pop queen discussed.
When she became politically active, she remained non-partisan and very local.
In 2007, she worked with then-Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) on a campaign to combat online stalkers.
In 2010, she supported then-First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign - prophetically alongside several NFL players who had partnered with the White House as part of the league's youth wellness initiative.
Whenever she was asked about her political views, Swift was evasive.
"It's my right to choose, but it's not my right to tell other people what to do," Swift, 24, told David Letterman in 2014.
Members of Congress from both parties held fundraisers on their “1989” tour in Washington in 2015.
As some of her famous friends became outspoken advocates for Hillary Clinton, campaign officials wondered whether Swift herself would support Donald Trump's 2016 opponent — and were ultimately disappointed when she didn't.
Swift would later regret her silence.
In "Miss Americana," a documentary chronicling Swift's political coming out, the pop star points to her 2017 sexual assault lawsuit against a Denver DJ as a political awakening.
(Swift won the lawsuit accusing the DJ of groping her at an event in 2013.) The experience "completely and immutably changed" her, she says in the documentary.
"I just thought to myself, 'Next time you have the opportunity to make a change, you better know what you stand for and what you want to say,'" she adds.
The next time came during the 2018 midterm elections. She offered her first political endorsements — to two Tennessee Democrats: Bredesen, who was running for U.S. Senate against Republican Marsha Blackburn, and Jim Cooper, then a U.S. representative up for re-election took over.
(Cooper, a 17-year incumbent, won his race; Bredesen lost).
Lisa Quigley, who served as Cooper's chief of staff, remembers being surprised by the support;
she was at home and her phone “literally exploded.”
"I remember Jim saying, 'That's nice,'" Quigley says of her boss's reaction to the news.
“Then he called back and said, ‘My daughter says this is a very big deal.
Laura Zapata, the communications director for Bredesen's Senate campaign, was on her way back from a campaign event when a friend alerted her to Swift's Instagram announcement.
Swift never spoke to either campaign;
Zapata says she and Swift interacted exclusively through Instagram, liking and posting each other's political content.
“It was very millennial,” Zapata says.
(Blackburn's opponent in 2024, Democrat Gloria Johnson, isn't holding back: "I'm a big fan, and we're going after her," she says of Swift.)
Swift supported the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020
Swift similarly surprised the Biden campaign in 2020 when she posted an emphatic "YES" in response to then-Senator Kamala Harris' announcement that she had been selected as Biden's nominee.
Swift later officially endorsed the campaign, sharing a photo with cookies emblazoned with the Biden-Harris campaign logo.
She also gave Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) permission to use her song "Only the Young" in a pro-Biden super PAC ad this year, Variety reports.
He will never reveal how Swalwell came to cooperate with Swift: “You ask Colonel Sanders for the recipe for the chicken,” Swalwell said when asked.
Big names mattered a lot to Biden in 2020, a year in which almost the entire campaign was conducted virtually.
The 2024 election campaign will feel different, and certain types of celebrities will be called upon for every occasion and every season.
For example, the campaign office tracks hip-hop artists in Atlanta and maintains lists of bands that are influential in Wisconsin, a state with a strong local music culture.
The campaign hopes big names like Swift can be tapped for a moment in the fall to boost voter registration or turnout.
As for the coveted Swift endorsement, some Democratic Swifties are nervous about all the members of their party explicitly talking about wanting the pop star to endorse Biden — and whether it's OK that they said all that.
“I don’t want us to overdo it,” said Annie Wu Henry, who, as a social media producer for Democrat John Fetterman’s 2022 Senate campaign in Pennsylvania, has resorted to Swift references in the candidate’s social posts.
“I want us to be conscious of how we appear to the public,” says Wu, who now works as a digital communications strategist for various Democrats and organizations.
“This whole discussion makes me sick.”
The recent Swift backlash on the right — which is dominated by a vocal, mostly male minority — has left some conservatives feeling uneasy, regardless of whether they are fans of Swift.
"This 'psyop' stuff makes us look like QAnon weirdos," says Alex Clark, a hardcore Swiftie who hosts a pop culture podcast for Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization.
“The left is trying to call us crazy, and that doesn’t help us.”
“If we approached these pop culture issues with a spirit of curiosity instead of denigrating them as psyops, perhaps more young people would listen to what we have to say,” says Mary Morgan, a Gen Z conservative who is a pop culture YouTube show host and is not a fan of Swift.
“This is exactly the kind of criticism that gives weight to the left-wing stereotype that conservative men don’t support women,” said Vanessa Santos, a conservative millennial and non-Swiftie who runs an advertising firm in Washington.
The Hill Swifties have a nuanced view of Swift's power as a political actor.
For them, that power doesn't necessarily have anything to do with naming their preferred candidates.
Their group chat is actually an offshoot of another chat aimed at queer female staffers in Congress.
Swift's advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights meant a lot to members of both chats.
One of them remembers crying when she saw Swift cast a trans man as a romantic partner in her music video for her song "Lavender Haze."
“Maybe she can’t convince a Republican to vote for Joe Biden,” said one Hill Swiftie, “but she could convince them that trans people are people.”
To the authors
Ashley Parker
is senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post.
She was part of two Post teams that won Pulitzer Prizes - in 2018 for national reporting and in 2022 for public service on the Jan. 6 attacks.
She joined the Post in 2017 after working at The New York Times for 11 years.
She also serves as an anchor on NBC News/MSNBC.
Kara Voght
is a political reporter for the Style section of The Washington Post.
She writes reports and profiles that capture political events.
She grew up in eastern Connecticut and lives in Washington.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 4, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.