Swift Voted is a play on attack ads against John Kerry. A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, put out ads that were lies claiming that John Kerry's combat awards were fake. This became known as "swiftboating."
Same! I’m not a tswift fan, but I give her credit for making people register, and remind me to check my voter status. She also gets some points for being a cat person lol
Also same! I saw her post on IG with her announcement and promptly checked that I was still registered, which I am, and still am getting an absentee ballot this time too. Then again, I usually either vote early and/or absentee and volunteer that day to help arrange rides for voters.
Don’t let the mid-30s, very bearded version of myself who was in a Target when they got caught absentmindedly singing along to a brand new song off of 1989 by a ~12 year old girl, who straight up pointed and laughed loudly before letting everyone within 10 aisles know what was happening, either.
I feel your suffering, bro. I have been there.. and no matter how you wanna feel like " fuck it and I don't care" one wishes the ground would open up and create a little space for us to crawl into and temporarily disappear. Thanks for making me relive it. Lmao.
100%. the old cranky boomers vote as they are told every singe time. the young people can utterly run over the old farts and fix the world by getting off their butts and go vote and do it regularly. Hell I would love to see young people start running for local council positions and smaler government roles to chase out those cranky old coots.
I'm 30 and have voted in every presidential election since coming of age, and have voted in every midterm, local race, etc. for the past three or four years. (I didn't do quite as hot at this before I moved to another area.)
Same. I think it’s the way I grew up but I can’t fathom NOT VOTING and I’m 33. If you don’t vote you better sit down and shut up because you’re the problem too.
That too is the group I'm looking forward to see enter into government. We have AOC there pushing as potentially one, but can you imagine when most of Congress is that generation? Hopefully they'll enact the changes either with them or by then that are needed.
Honestly her level of popularity is incredible when I think about it.
In like 2014 when I was about done with high school she felt like the biggest pop star I could think of off the top of my head. 1989 and Red were massive and I wasn’t even necessarily a big fan of hers I just had a lot of friends who were big fans of hers.
But in the last 10 years she’s somehow like tripled/quadrupled her overall popularity despite her starting position in 2014 already being stratospheric and basically the biggest musician I could think of back then.
Really incredible that she has not only kept her momentum from one generation to the next but she somehow vastly accelerated it as well.
Like in 2014, the distance between her and the 2nd biggest pop star (ed Sheeran maybe? Hard to remember back a decade tbh) was say “1x”. But now the gap between her and the current 2nd biggest pop star feels like “5x”. I have no idea if any of this is even halfway true but it’s just what I see from my perspective today.
The demographic still doesn't vote nearly as dedicated as old people unfortunately. younger people could be a massive voting block that can turn states if they only voted as consistently as old people did. Some of these elections are won or lost by literal thousands of people. 1 vote absolutely does matter, especially if you're doing down ballot stuff too.
The demographic still doesn't vote nearly as dedicated as old people unfortunately
Yeah, because our employees won't give us time off, and most of us can't afford to even miss a day of work. Old people typically have nothing BUT time in their day to do as they please.
This is my first year I'm voting by mail, but every other year I've taken a hit to PTO or I've gotten "points" against my attendance because I went out to vote.
And with early/mail in voting becoming so common now, the "we can't because of work" excuse isn't nearly as valid as it used to be. Not trying to attack you specifically, since obviously I don't know your situation, but generally that reasoning doesn't hold the same water it did 15-20 years ago.
I definitely agree there. Though, id be willing to bet that most voters wouldn't even be able to tell you whether or not their home state has those protections and are limiting themselves without realizing it.
not just every election, people keep asking how GTA V keeps staying near the top of the Steam sales charts and it's because of just that, there's always new people becoming old enough to want to and now are able to buy GTA V
It's so weird to me you have to register in the US, instead of just sending a letter to every single adult over the age of 18. You have registries with addresses, it's not complicated
Many of them are likely at voting age for the first time. Considering they’re in the midst of their college years (or the early stages of their careers), they’re inundated on all sides with different things drawing their attention and on which they can spend their time.
Teenagers and young adults don’t always prioritize well, I’m not gonna take it as a bad thing that a prominent entertainment figure in their life is encouraging them to get engaged in their futures and that of their peers.
Yep, and many studies show if you vote once, you are exceedingly more likely to stay a lifelong voter. Starting young women as voters before they’ve got husbands filling their heads who to vote for is vital. I’ve met far too many women in their 40s-50s whose only voting knowledge is what they’re told to vote or think of by their husbands.
If Taylor Swift telling them to go and vote is what it takes so women don’t fall down that hole, I’m all for it even if I don’t personally like her music.
This happened to my sister, her husband surrendered to right wing hate ideology and dragged her into it with him.
I would routinely embarrass him in political discussions and make him rage quit and say stupid shit, and she wouldn’t budge. Now that he’s in jail, and they’re divorcing, she’s coming back to reality.
It's a pathway in and usually young adults need that because politics at that age are very boring to most people in their 20's into 30's. It's happened in most generations this way. Remember Rock the Vote MTV started airing in the 90's to essentially plead with young people the importance of voting?
Young adults sometimes feel like they just "dont know enough" about life or politics to think theyre going to make an intelligent vote so they end up not doing so. Gotta tell them its ok not knowing everything. Its 100% ok to leave stuff blank if youre unsure, just vote for the stuff that has an impact to you.
The 405,999 reported in the article were visitors who came from her instagram link. It’s insane. I’d love to hear the registrations the states are getting.
I would love to see an America where 80-90% of the citizens make it to the polls. 2020 was the highest turnout ever and even then it was only 67% iirc.
I'm hoping for 80% and I think it might happen. 90% I don't even think I can compute that lol.
Unfortunately one of the downsides of living in a free society means people are free to be apathetic, civically illiterate, and lazy. Maybe the JLVRA should have an amendment added making it illegal not to vote.
Here in Australia we have mandatory voting, and we routinely hit 90%+! and thats in a country with vast outback country with incredibly remote people. (Australia is the size of the USA but only has 25 million people... I cannot understate the vastness of our land) Our last election in 2022 was the first since 1922 to be lower than 90%.. and it still did 89.22%.
Because its a legal obligation, we have an independent electoral commission which makes voting as accessible and easy as they can, from running polling on Saturday, to offering prepoll and postal votes, to even running remote teams that drive 100s of kms to remote outback stations to allow the 30 people that live there to vote. They even run a polling station in Antarctica for the scientists stationed out there. I've volunteered for the AEC before and it's genuinely amazing to see the work folks do every election.
America really needs to implement the same system, that way everyone has their vote counted, and politics becomes less divisive because politicians need to win a majority of their constituents, not just those whom vote.
America really needs to implement the same system, that way everyone has their vote counted, and politics becomes less divisive because politicians need to win a majority of their constituents, not just those whom vote.
Sadly, that's exactly why it won't happen, because the right wing relies on gerrymandering, voter suppression, and general fuckery to maintain their hold on power since the more people that vote, the more power they lose.
I'd genuinely be very surprised if we get anywhere close to 2020 voter participation levels. I'd love to be really wrong. But 2020 was a bit of an anomaly due to COVID and people being stuck at home.
You'd need to change laws to get to or surpass 80%. The cleverest thing Democrats could do is pass a mandatory voter ID, everyone is automatically registered and no possibility of fraud, foreigners voting, duplicate voting, etc. Isn't that what Republicans wanted? And watch them try to oppose it. "Not like this!"
The Republicans do everything they can to keep that from happening in red states. They have been for years. We need a new federal voting rights act passed to prevent the gerrymandering and other shenanigans they get up to every election year.
“405,999 people were referred to Vote.gov directly from Swift’s Instagram page. Such a number dwarfs the website’s usual traffic, which averages about 30,000 visitors per day.“
Seems like this can be attributed to her directly.
Last election was not about losing all their reproductive rights. It might be down to a few thousand votes in a few counties in Pennsylvania. The Pikachu face of people who did not bother to vote when things turn against them is always frustrating.
The principle of it is quite concerning because you think, if things were just a little different she could just as easily have drummed up arbitrary support for the other side. It also means that there is a significant number of voters on both sides of the aisle who completely miss the point of politics and that the modern US is built on basically complete randomness.
Turns out that a lot of women don't like the idea of being forced to give birth to a dead baby because a bunch of megachurch kid fuckers decided that a bunch of bronze age goat fuckers told them that it's better to let women die than give them basic heath care.
Well obviously, the concerning part is how many young women apparently needed a celebrity to tell them to go and vote against that crap. It hasn't exactly been subtle the past few years. Unless you are living under a rock you have surely been aware of the GOP's war against women's rights. Why were so many apparently unconcerned until Taylor told them to go vote??? Its baffling to me
I don’t think many people are changing their political views for Taylor. I think it’s more likely that she reminded people to check their registration status and encouraged first time voters to register.
Which isn’t nothing. A lot of young people don’t fully understand the process and think their vote doesn’t matter. So encouragement from their favorite artist packaged with an easily accessible link can motivate them to actually do it.
Some people need the reminder. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of those registrations were from people who idly checked the voting rolls and discovered they'd been purged.
Taking over the world and giving it back to the people era. Major major cred to Tay for this. She didn’t have to, especially given security fears. She’s the man
There could also be an element relating to the debate as well, where people are figuring out that they need to register to stop the racist clown from getting into office again. The timing fits both scenarios.
I'm confused as to why so many people were waiting for her to post about registering to vote/endorsing Kamala, and yet so many of them didn't register until she told them to?
I hope so. There are enough young people to outvote my generation, the baby boomers. They can’t just sit home and wait for us to die. They have to come out now and start voting.
6.0k
u/Flirtymiranda03 6d ago
Swifties starting their political era.