If she builds it, they will come. Taylor Swift’s getting credit for moving more than 35,000 of her fans to fill out some blank spaces and register to vote.
Swift shared an Instagram Story last week directing fans to nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org, providing a link for them to register to vote.
“Are you registered to vote yet?” Swift asked. “I’ve been so lucky to see so many of you guys at my U.S. shows recently. I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year! Register to vote in less than 2 minutes at vote.org/NVRD.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how many of those registrations could be directly attributed to Swift’s post — TheWrap reached out to Vote.org for more information. But in the hour following her post, the site had a 1,226% jump in participation, according to the organization, which released the results this week.
“Our site was averaging 13,000 users every 30 minutes — a number that Taylor Swift would be proud of,” Vote.org CEO Andrea Hailey said in a statement, noting the singer’s love for the number 13.
The newly eligible 18-year-olds who registered to vote in particular more than doubled the number who signed up last year. The number of overall registrations reported by Vote.org was the most since 2020, according to the voting organization. That’s a 23% jump over how many registered ahead of the midterm elections in 2022.
Swift has encouraged her fans to vote over the years, but she had a longtime history of avoiding being seen as political or making endorsements. Her first endorsement was in 2018, posting in support of Tennessee Democrats while making her home in the Nashville suburbs. She also made waves with more political comments in Netflix doc “Miss Americana,” which premiered Jan. 31, 2020.
The pop and country music icon has had a huge year as she performed on her Eras Tour throughout the country, as well as re-releasing “Speak Now” earlier this year and “1989” next month. The Eras Tour concert film is set to debut next month and is already on track to bring in big box office.
To be fair, the 35,252 new registrations reported by Vote.org is just 0.01% of Tay Tay’s Instagram followers. But we’re sure that many of those other Swifties are already registered, are too young to vote or are part of the worldwide non-U.S. Swift community.
Plus, 157,041 total eligible voters visited Vote.org on National Voter Registration Day, so she may have planted some seeds for folks to come back. Vote.org plans to register 8 million voters by Election Day 2024.
