Taylor Swift: Voter Registration Spike Follows Star’s Political Awakening
New voter registrations are up following Taylor Swift’s unprecedented social media blast.
LISA O'CONNOR
Taylor Swift’s first foray into politics appears to have produced impressive results. The non-partisan advocacy group Vote.org reports tens of thousands of new voter registrations nationwide in the wake of Swift's Instagram post which urged her 112 million followers to vote for the Democrats in November’s midterm elections.
Swift’s post directed fans to “go to vote.org.” The site had 155,940 unique visitors in the last 24 hours against this year's daily average of 14,078.
“We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift's post,” Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org, told Buzzfeed, which reports, for context, that 190,178 new voters registered nationwide in the entire month of September, while just 56,669 signed on in August.
There was a particular bump in registrations in her home state of Tennessee, where Swift, who has previously maintained a strict silence on political questions and had been widely claimed by the right, gave a ringing endorsement to two Democratic candidates running in this year's midterms, and trashed Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn.
She said of Blackburn, “her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me. She voted against equal pay for women. She voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape. She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples. She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values."
“Vote.org saw [Tennessee] registrations spike specifically since Taylor's post," Guthrie told Buzzfeed, saying the organization has seen 2,144 registrations in the last 36 hours, up from 2,811 new Tennessee voter registrations for the entire month of September and just 951 in August.
Today, as Swift's post sought to inform her fans, is the last day on which Tennesseans can register to vote.
"Thank God for Taylor Swift," Guthrie told Buzzfeed.
Swift's message, which condemned LGBTQ-discrimination and racism among other themes, created enough traction to draw criticism from Donald Trump who told reporters that Blackburn is, "doing a good job."