Dem
51
GOP
49
Apparently Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are a thing at the moment. In case you don't know who Travis Kelce is, he is a football player for the Kansas City Chiefs. In case you didn't know who Taylor Swift is, well, that is actually impossible. They seem to like each other. We hope they will continue liking each other for a long time, but each one has a long track record of liking people and then not liking them.
Speaking of not liking people, neither one likes Donald Trump. At all. And each of them has a massive fan base. Kelce has 5 million followers on Twitter (X). But that is small potatoes compared to Swift's 450 million followers. Their fans span all age groups, but both, and especially Swift, have a lot of young fans.
What would (will?) happen if they decide to get political? When Swift put out one story on Instagram last week urging her fans to vote, vote.org registered a jump in traffic of over 1,200% in the next hour. When she went to a Kansas City Chiefs game, thus de facto confirming the rumored relationship, sales of his merchandise jumped 400%. Suppose both of them now regularly urge all their fans to register to vote and when early voting starts, urge them to vote now. What if Swift writes a song about democracy or voting and it becomes a hit? Even if they sort of stay neutral and don't tell their fans that they think Donald Trump is a piece of toxic garbage, the majority of young people are Democrats, so just by boosting turnout, Swift and Kelce are de facto helping the Democrats.
Also a factor is that Swift is a big supporter of empowering women. For example, about reproductive freedom. Almost certainly, millions of her fans care about the subject. If she decides she wants to get seriously involved (for example, appearing in ads about reproductive freedom), she could get a lot of young women to the polls and probably not so many of them would vote for Republicans in general or Donald Trump in particular. Kelce, for his part, might cause a different fanbase to take note of what Swift is saying. It's worth noting that he's certainly willing to speak up on touchy issues; he is currently starring in a public service ad about the importance of getting an updated COVID vaccination.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this power couple really decides to use its power. (V)