Did Taylor Swift’s Political Statement Cause a Huge Voter Registration Spike?
Sorry to disappoint you, Donald Trump, but it looks like Taylor Swift's call-to-action for young voters had massive effects.
Within a day of Swift's public endorsement of respective Democratic Senate and House of Representatives candidates Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper, Vote.org recorded a huge spike in voter registrations.
"We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T.Swift’s post," Vote.org Director of Communications Kamari Guthrie told BuzzFeed News late Monday evening (October 8).
BuzzFeed writes that the number is "a little under half the new voters the country saw in the entire month of September."
Swift's voting state of Tenneesee specifically saw an uptick in registered voters. Out of the 5,183 newly registered voters this month so far, 2,144 registrations were completed within the 36 hours following the pop star's Instagram post.
"To have someone of her stature and with such a large microphone to step up and actually reinforce what we already know here is definitely going to boost the morale of people who have been told Tennesseans are divisive,” Mary Mancini, the chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, told BuzzFeed News regarding Swift's endorsement.
On Sunday (October 7), Swift, who has historically been private about her political views, published a lengthy statement about the importance of voting to Instagram, detailing why she won't be voting for Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn.