Taylor Swift endorses — and searches for voter registration jump

There weren’t many things that could have diverted the political world’s attention from Vice President Kamala Harris’s dominant performance against Donald Trump in Tuesday night’s debate. But at 11 p.m., Taylor Swift managed it.

Her endorsement of the Democratic nominee wasn’t surprising, as such. She endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and has endorsed other Democrats in the past. It was so expected, in fact, that people were surprised when rumors about her performing at the Democratic convention didn’t come to fruition. But “unsurprising” doesn’t mean “not impactful.” And by at least one immediate measure, the endorsement had impact.

As has been the case in the past, Swift’s endorsement was a careful one. Posted on Instagram, it encouraged her followers — all 283 million of them — to look into the candidates for themselves. But then she explained why she backed Harris, ending the post with a pointed description of herself as a “childless cat lady.”

Her most forceful plug was one she’d offered before: that her followers should register to vote. Google data suggests that this pitch had an effect, correlating with an uptick in the number of people headed to the search engine to figure out how to do so.

The biggest spike Tuesday came about halfway through the debate, at about the point that Trump was being asked about his role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Search interest tapered off as the debate wound down. And then, when Swift’s endorsement dropped, it jumped back up.

How do we know this was a function of Swift? Well, we don’t specifically, except that the surge overlapped with a big spike in searches for Swift herself. Google’s data also indicates that the top search related to the term was “taylor swift voter registration.”

Mind you, the graph above isn’t to scale. It simply shows the peak interest in both terms over the three-hour period displayed. If we show search interest for Swift and voter registration relative to each other, there’s no contest.

In August, as a pro-Harris group of Swift fans got geared up, we looked at the way in which the pop megastar was better positioned to have a political impact now than in past election cycles. For one thing, she’s way more famous than she used to be. For another, her fan base of young women has, like all of us, gotten older — and many or most are now able to vote. For a third, as we noted then, Swift is viewed more positively now than she was in 2018 when she offered her endorsement to a Democratic Senate candidate.

Even among Republicans.

Trump, who was already having a bad night by the time Swift’s endorsement landed, is doing his best to take the development in stride. On Wednesday morning, he called in to Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” a show on which he was once a weekly contributor. The hosts gently probed Trump for his reaction to Swift’s move; he suggested, sort of randomly, that he preferred the wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

Then he made a prediction: Swift would “probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.”

It’s possible, sure. It is also possible that the result of Swift’s endorsement will be that Trump pays a price for it on Election Day.