Taylor Swift’s political leanings have been a topic of debate for many years now (Swift herself released a whole documentary about it). The Tortured Poets Department singer has a long history with Donald Trump, who practically begged her not to endorse his 2024 opponent. And a troubling number of Americans believe an unhinged conspiracy theory about Biden and Swift rigging the Super Bowl in favor of her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs.
So what’s really going on here? Has Taylor Swift actually endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential election? What’s her relationship with Biden and Trump? Could Swifties really decide the election, as some pundits have suggested? Here’s a guide to Swift’s stance on the 2024 election, which we’ll keep updated and packed with Easter eggs that will tell you the Reputation (Taylor’s Version) release date (just kidding).
Probably! She’s yet to announce her preferred candidate in the 2024 election, but since she endorsed Biden in 2020, it seems likely that she’ll do so again.
Swift hasn’t commented on Biden recently. She made her first public presidential endorsement about a month before the 2020 election, announcing her support for the Biden-Harris ticket with this tweet:
I spoke to @vmagazine about why I’ll be voting for Joe Biden for president. So apt that it’s come out on the night of the VP debate. Gonna be watching and supporting @KamalaHarris by yelling at the tv a lot. And I also have custom cookies 🍪💪😘
📷 @inezandvinoodh pic.twitter.com/DByvIgKocr
Swift told V magazine:
The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included. Everyone deserves a government that takes global health risks seriously and puts the lives of its people first. The only way we can begin to make things better is to choose leaders who are willing to face these issues and find ways to work through them.
I will proudly vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. Under their leadership, I believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs.
In recent years, Swift has periodically encouraged her social-media followers to vote. After she posted an Instagram message about registering to vote in September 2023, the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org recorded 35,252 new registrations on National Voter Registration Day, a 23 percent increase over the previous year.
On March 5, 2024 she encouraged her supporters to vote on Super Tuesday, but she didn’t back any specific candidates.
📲 Taylor Swift via IG Story encouraging people to vote today in the Presidential Primary!
Link: https://t.co/XSpJxNAGQB pic.twitter.com/l9yklmD8PR
After confusing Swift for Britney Spears during his 2023 turkey pardon, Biden made clear this year that he does in fact know who she is, and would appreciate another endorsement.
In February 2024, Biden joked several times about working with Swift to rig the Super Bowl for the Kansas City Chiefs. He referenced the baseless conspiracy theory — which nearly one in five Americans believe — in his first TikTok and this post-game social-media post:
A post shared by Joe Biden (@joebiden)
When Seth Meyers asked the president to “confirm or deny” that there is an “active conspiracy” between him and Swift a short time later, the president answered, “It’s classified.” He repeated the line when asked if she might endorse him again in 2024.
Are @POTUS and Taylor Swift actually in cahoots? @sethmeyers puts President Biden on the spot. https://t.co/Sjmf1fi4zr pic.twitter.com/GQ9saZS5Wx
While Biden has tried to play it cool in public, in January the New York Times reported that his campaign desperately wants Swift to get involved in the 2024 race:
… The biggest and most influential endorsement target is Ms. Swift … Fund-raising appeals from Ms. Swift could be worth millions of dollars for Mr. Biden.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Biden surrogate, all but begged Ms. Swift to become more involved in Mr. Biden’s campaign when he spoke to reporters after a Republican primary debate in September.
“Taylor Swift stands tall and unique,” he said. “What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful.”
The chatter around Ms. Swift and the potential of reaching her 279 million Instagram followers reached such intensity that the Biden team urged applicants in a job posting for a social media position not to describe their Taylor Swift strategy — the campaign had enough suggestions already. One idea that has been tossed around, a bit in jest: sending the president to a stop on Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour.
Yes. She publicly criticized Trump for the first time on June 1, 2019 in an open letter to Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, urging the Republican to ensure protections for the LGBTQ+ community by passing the Equality Act. She said of then-President Trump:
I personally reject the President’s stance that his administration “supports equal treatment of all,” but that the Equality Act, “in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to determine parental and conscience rights.” No, one cannot take the position that one supports a community, while condemning it in the next breath as going against “conscience” or “parental rights.” That statement implies that there is something morally wrong with you being anything other than heterosexual or cisgender, which is an incredibly harmful letter to send to a nation full of healthy and loving families with same-sex, non-binary or transgender parents, sons or daughters.
Swift kept her political views to herself until the 2018 midterms, when she spoke out against Tennessee Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn (her decision to endorse two Democrats in that election was a major plot point in her documentary Miss Americana). Swift explained why she’d previously remained silent in her Instagram post opposing Blackburn (who went on to win the election):
In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now. I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country. I believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent.
As the 2020 election grew closer, Swift voiced her support for the Black Lives Matter movement and criticized Trump several times on Twitter. In May 2020 she promised “we will vote you out in November”:
After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November. @realdonaldtrump
And in August 2020, she accused Trump of trying to sabotage mail-in voting and said his “ineffective leadership” had “gravely worsened” the COVID-19 crisis:
Donald Trump’s ineffective leadership gravely worsened the crisis that we are in and he is now taking advantage of it to subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely. Request a ballot early. Vote early.
Yes, on more than one occasion. In January 2020 Swift released the song “Only the Young” to accompany the Miss Americana documentary. The lyrics seemed to make reference to Trump winning the 2016 election and other political issues, like school shootings: “You go to class, scared / Wondering where the best hiding spot would be / And the big bad man and his big bad clan / Their hands are stained with red.”
In October 2020, Swift allowed Representative Eric Swalwell’s Remedy PAC to use the song in a pro-Biden ad and got a personal thank you from Kamala Harris:
Taylor Swift has 87.3 million followers on Twitter - the exact same number as Trump.
This is the first campaign ad she has ever given permission to use her music.#onlytheyoung
https://t.co/6TohIvM5Mz
Thank you @TaylorSwift13 and my friend @EricSwalwell for showing young people what's at stake in this election. https://t.co/T5EQO1GLnC
While Swift’s 2019 song “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” is less explicitly anti-Trump, she confirmed in a September 2019 Rolling Stone interview that the high-school metaphor in the song is about Trump-era politics:
There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.
We know from this clip of Trump quietly driving his Rolls-Royce while listening to “Blank Space,” which was filmed by Melania Trump and posted on her Facebook page, that he doesn’t mind her music.
However, Trump has some issues with Swift herself. The ex-president and the pop star are engaged in a popularity contest (in his mind, at least). Rolling Stone reported in January:
Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is “more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does, a person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Last month, the source close to Trump adds, the ex-president commented to some confidants that it “obviously” made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year — an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.
On February 11, Trump made a desperate attempt to steal attention from Kelce and Swift and convince her not to endorse Biden. He posted this on Truth Social hours before the Super Bowl:
In 2020, Swift officially endorsed Biden less than a month before Election Day. If she follows that precedent, she might make an endorsement while she’s on a break from The Eras Tour. The European leg of her tour runs from May 9 to August 20, followed by a ten-week break. Election Day is November 5, and Swift’s tour resumes in Canada the following week.
Could the megastar help boost turnout in the November election, especially among younger voters who aren’t that enthusiastic about another Biden-Trump matchup? That’s what multiple commentators have suggested. But PolitiFact poured cold water on the idea:
… it is misguided to assume that Swift’s potential involvement in the race would be a magic bullet with guaranteed results. Experts say it often takes more than a single message or action for celebrity endorsements to move the needle in elections. And younger people could be particularly hard to sway because they consistently chalk up the lowest turnout rates at the polls. An endorsement would draw attention, but her fans already lean left.
On the other hand, Biden did beat Trump in 2020. And betting against the power of Swifties is usually a bad idea.
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