Best Of

Fun.

I totally love you ladies! This is the first place I came to get debate feedback, (restless thru the night), and you did not disappoint! It’s wonderful to get your take on how things went, and then to further read the cherry on top news here of Taylor Swift’s impeccable timing endorsing Kamala Harris for President….well, that is the kind of news this thread delivers sometimes that is beyond satisfying!

I don’t even subscribe to the NYT, but when I googled Swift’s name, this article came up in full. I was able to read and copy the whole thing without it being blocked. So I guess the NYT is in a celebratory mood, too. Lol. And I see Taylor mentions Childless Cat Ladies, and and refers to herself as one so that group has got to be over the moon about it. I’m thrilled with her perfectly executed endorsement of Harris for maximum impact!

Her Instagram post backing the vice president came shortly after Ms. Harris and former President Donald Trump had stepped off the debate stage.

In her Instagram post with her pet cat, Taylor Swift said she would vote for Kamala Harris “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”Credit...Instagram

Look what they made her do.

Taylor Swift, who is one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons and has an enormous following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris late Tuesday after Ms. Harris’s debate against former President Donald J. Trump.

The endorsement by Ms. Swift, delivered minutes after Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump had stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms. Harris an unrivaled celebrity backer and a tremendous shot of adrenaline to her campaign, especially with the younger voters she has been trying to attract.

“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Ms. Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them."

She signed her post as “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to comments made by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, about women without children. The photo that accompanied her post showed her holding a furry feline, Benjamin Button, her pet Ragdoll. Ms. Swift’s endorsement was much anticipated among Democrats. The singer has expressed regret for not having done more to speak out about her opposition to Mr. Trump during his first run in 2016. Since then, she has embraced a more political posture while speaking out on issues such as abortion access. But the precise timing of Tuesday’s endorsement was something of a surprise: Ms. Swift endorsed Joe Biden on Oct. 7, 2020, closer to the election.

The impact of Ms. Swift’s endorsement may be hard to quantify, but her ability to get supporters to register to vote came into sharp relief just last year. In a brief post on her Instagram account in 2023, Ms. Swift encouraged her 272 million supporters at the time to vote and included a link to the website Vote.org.

The site later reported 35,252 new registrations that day, a significant jump compared with the previous year, and an especially significant spike in a nonelection year.

On Tuesday, Ms. Swift included a similar link to Vote.gov in her Instagram story.

In her post endorsing Ms. Harris, Ms. Swift also referred to her “fears” about artificial intelligence. She pointed to content generated by the technology that had falsely suggested that she supported Mr. Trump, which the former president promoted on social media. She underscored concerns that Americans would not know where she genuinely stood if she had not spoken out.

“It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Ms. Swift wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth."

Mr. Trump has called Ms. Swift “liberal” but “beautiful,” and he has praised a friend of hers, Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, as well. Some fans of Ms. Swift had encouraged her to go public about her support for Ms. Harris to make a point of contrast after it appeared that Ms. Mahomes had liked one of Mr. Trump’s social media posts.

Ms. Swift, who has been a star musician spanning country and pop music for almost two decades, is one of the few celebrities with broad appeal and the ability to cut through a crowded media environment. Her romance with Travis Kelce, the star tight end for the Chiefs, has captivated the worlds of football and culture, and she is in the final stages of a head-spinning international tour that has sold out stadiums around the globe.

The presidential election is 55 days away. Here’s our guide to the run-up to Election Day.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, dismissed the endorsement as “more evidence that the Democrat party has become the party of the wealthy elite.”

In 2020, Ms. Swift’s endorsement of Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris generated significant backlash from conservatives who urged her to keep her music career apolitical.

Four years later, her growing political involvement led to fevered speculation from Democrats about whether and when she would endorse Ms. Harris. Last month, some fans became convinced that she was signaling her endorsement by posting a photo of one of her backup dancers in silhouette that bore a resemblance to the vice president.

For her part, Ms. Harris has embraced pop music in her campaign.

Her rallies have had the feel of concerts as much as political events, with hip-hop stars like Megan Thee Stallion giving performances and D.J.s warming up dancing crowds of thousands before the vice president walks onstage to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom.” (Many Democrats had hoped that Beyoncé would perform at the party’s national convention in Chicago, but rumors of her presence turned out to be false.)

Mr. Biden’s rallies, in comparison, were small and low in energy, often reaching their peak of raucousness when a high school drum line played.

Polls show that Ms. Harris is doing much better with younger voters than Mr. Biden was, a crucial part of a resurgence in her polls that has allowed her to draw even with Mr. Trump. Ms. Swift’s backing of her campaign is a reflection of that appeal.

In making her endorsement, Ms. Swift added that she was “heartened and impressed” by Ms. Harris’s choice of Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, saying that Mr. Walz had been “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”

Soon after, Mr. Walz appeared on MSNBC, where the host Rachel Maddow read Ms. Swift’s endorsement to him in its entirety.

“I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift,” Mr. Walz said, putting his hand over his heart. “I say that also as a cat owner — a fellow cat owner.”

Ms. Swift has long pushed for her supporters to do their civic duty, posting a picture of herself in a long line on Election Day in 2016, a photo her fans thought was a cryptic endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

It was not until 2018 that Ms. Swift made her first formal foray into politics by endorsing a Democrat, Phil Bredesen, over a Republican, Marsha Blackburn, in a Tennessee Senate race. (Nashville is the nation’s country music capital, and Ms. Swift maintains a residence there.)

Ms. Blackburn won the race by more than 10 percentage points in the deep red state.

In an interview with Vogue in 2019, Ms. Swift indicated that she had wanted to be more vocal about supporting Mrs. Clinton but had worried that her support could backfire. She said she had feared that Mr. Trump might try “weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement” against her and Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Swift also shared concerns that public criticism of her at the time would be unfairly applied to Ms. Clinton as well.

Ms. Swift continued: “The summer before that election, all people were saying was, ‘She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar.’ These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability?”

All I have to say is brava Kamala, brava!