Music mega-star Taylor Swift endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president following her Wednesday night debate against former president Trump.
Swift said felt the need to publicly correct the record after Trump posted to his website a false AI statement claiming that Swift had endorsed him.
“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Swift wrote in a statement on Instagram accompanied by a photo of her holding a cat. “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”
Swift was expected to formally weigh-in on the race given that she endorsed President Biden in 2020. She cited Biden’s support for abortion rights, minority representation, and LGBT activism as her motivating factors at the time. Similarly, Swift lauded Harris’s running mate, progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz, “who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
Rather than implore her 283 million followers to vote for Harris, Swift urged them to do their due diligence and “research,” as she did, to reach their own conclusion. The statement ended with a kitschy attribution in her signature, “Childless Cat Lady,” nodding to resurfaced remarks from GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. In an August 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Vance disparaged the “childless cat ladies” in control of the Democratic Party who “are miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Walz celebrated Swift’s endorsement on MSNBC, saying: “I’m incredibly grateful to Taylor Swift and I say that also as a cat owner. That was eloquent and it was clear and that’s the type of courage we need in America…this will be the opportunity Swifties.”
Before Swift’s endorsement, she received flak from entertainment media for her silence on 2024. Daniel D’Addario, Variety’s chief correspondent, slammed the singer for not backing Harris and allowing Trump to use the A.I.-generated images falsely suggesting she endorsed him. D’Addario also called out Swift for being friends with suspected MAGA-sympathizer Brittany Mahomes, wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is teammates with Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce. Mahomes was discovered to have engaged with pro-Trump content on social media, after which the former president thanked her for her support. Some fans of Swift demanded online that she divorce herself from the Mahomes over their perceived conservative politics.
Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, recently told the Daily Mail, “Taylor Swift needs to step forward. She’s very influential.”
Swift has worn her progressive politics on her sleeve since the 2018 midterms, when she endorsed a Tennessee Democrat running against now-sitting Republican U.S. senator Marsha Blackburn. After the fall of Roe v. Wade, Swift tweeted: “I’m absolutely terrified that this is where we are – that after so many decades of people fighting for women’s rights to their own bodies, today’s decision has stripped us of that.”