Taylor Swift singlehandedly increased vote.gov activity by more than 1000 percent

We joke around these parts, from time to time, about how much impact Taylor Swift has on our collective reality. Focus solely on her primary role as a musician, and the numbers are already daunting—best selling tour of all time, $267 million concert film, constant shattering of her own streaming records and other sales metrics, etc. But they only get more intimidating when you clock her other effects on a culture that frequently seems to now rotate around her. There’s a reason pretty much the entirety of NFL marketing “pivoted to Taylor” the second she had a personal interest in the sport, and there’s a reason conversations about her endorsing a political candidate have been headline-making news for years. Still, it can be kind of daunting to look at one individual number that directly clocks how much we’re all just living in (Taylor’s Version). Like, say, learning that she increased traffic on the U.S. government’s voter registration site by more than 1,000 percent just by reminding people that, yeah, they probably should vote.

This is per CBS News, reporting on numbers released by federal voting registration site vote.gov, which confirmed that 405,999 people visited the site in the 24 hours after Swift made her big endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, specifically “from the custom URL created and shared by Ms. Swift.” For comparison’s sake: The site normally gets just 30,000 visitors per day. That is what we would call a measurable influence; even if only 10 percent of people who visited the site thanks to Swift ended up actually signing up to vote, that’s still a healthy new boatload of suffragettes and suffragents in the pool. (As to whether there’s genuine evidence celebrity endorsements can sway voters, it’s still a bit up in the air; CBC found a study that suggested that Oprah might have helped swing the Democratic primary for Barack Obama back in 2008, and political science folks have tried to examine the issue from multiple angles in the past. One general conclusion we saw while looking through the literature is that celebrity endorsements tend to have the largest impact on voters who are mostly checked out of the political process, and who look to famous folks they trust to get their general cues. By no means a solved topic, but undeniably a scary one!)

Anyway, thank God Taylor didn’t endorse non-voting, or vote.gov probably would have somehow ended up with negative visits; we don’t know what happens then, but it’s probably not good for democracy.