Taylor Swift’s off-the-charts popularity has led to her voice being a decisive factor in the US presidential election’s outcome. Is Joe Biden going to be re-elected or is Donald Trump going to win back the Oval Office? What makes this woman such an imperious presence for the US political heavy-hitters and what should she think about as she makes her pick?
According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, US President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have hit yet another low at 36%.
The Redfield & Wilton Strategies findings, published by Newsweek, are not music to Biden’s ear either. In what may be deemed as an insult to the incumbent president, 22% of the Americans who voted for him in the 2020 election will not mind voting for Trump this time, should the latter be endorsed by Taylor Swift.
Unless you live stateside, it may sound weird to you. And we are not talking Biden’s nosediving popularity, which is quite obvious from the footage of him apparently losing touch with reality and stumbling ever too often. Even though it may even be abundantly clear to the Americans, it is not the most burning issue.
According to the recent assessment conducted by the Fed, almost two-thirds of the Americans are going through a financial decline. Twenty percent of the Americans find themselves in a very bad spot. As US history suggests, incumbents rarely get re-elected when faced with such a mess. Before taking a trip to the polls, voters tend to double-check their wallets.
If amid an economic downturn, foreign policy debacles and the president’s questionable fitness for office Ms Swift suggests that people tick the opposition candidate’s box, it will make perfect sense. But what kind of a Mighty Rearranger is she to be able to, allegedly, swing the November election’s outcome? Unlike the Biden-gate, people outside the US may not be aware of Taylor Swift’s crucial role in American history.
In a word, she is a lionised idol, much like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and The Beatles were back in the day. All of them can, in some respects, be easily eclipsed by the songstress. While each of the listed musicians carved out a legendary niche for themselves in a single genre, Taylor experiments with various styles, including pop, rock’n’roll and country music, the latter being her old stomping ground. At 34, she has set multiple music industry records in popularity, sales and accolades.
Swift’s influence, however, transcends the music industry. Her opinions are a big factor for the US legislators. For instance, they are closing in on the bill banning unauthorised videos featuring digital copies of real people. The law has been lobbied for by none other than Taylor Swift.
Besides, she is a billionairess. Last year’s world tour alone earned her exactly $1bn in what constituted yet another record to her credit.
But even that is mostly beside the point. Crucially, Swift has been someone capable of bridging the domestic divide as she is hugely popular with Democrats, Republicans, women, men, teenagers, and grown-ups alike. According to The Times, some 53% of the US adults count themselves among the artist’s fans. Some go so far as to say Taylor Swift is indeed synonymous with America.
That this woman can affect the presidential election’s outcome is evidenced by Donald Trump’s behaviour. Ahead of Super Bowl LVIII, the former president took to social media to try and persuade the songstress to disavow Joe Biden’s bid, even bothering to list the reasons.
‘There’s no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money,’ Trump wrote, referencing the modernised copyright ownership legislation he had signed in 2018.
This is totally un-Trump behaviour. If anyone voices their dislike of him, he tends to trash their take. But as an experienced showbiz insider, the otherwise self-assured billionaire is fawning over the popular hitmaker.
According to The New York Times, Biden’s aides are doing the same thing. Aside from that, the Democratic Party started recruiting new voters right at Taylor Swift’s sold-out concert venues. By the looks of it, they are banking on Swift’s professed liberal leaning, quite typical of the showbiz. For example, she calls herself a feminist and backs LGBTQ+.
That being said, her staple genre is country music representing the American South and the rural areas, in other words, overwhelmingly the GOP electorate. Perhaps that is what makes Swift steer clear of party politics: she wants to be popular with all audiences. True, ahead of the 2020 election, she reluctantly spoke in favour of Joe Biden’s candidacy, but those words were largely forced. Four years later, she is being tight-lipped on the subject, even though both major presidential hopefuls are itching to get her endorsement.
It may be seen as American childishness at its worst. After all, in previous epochs, to which some refer as the nation’s heyday, many a showbiz representative, barring perhaps the country musicians, were hard at work consistently campaigning for the Democratic candidates, and yet, a lot of those efforts would time and again draw a blank. For all of the mind-blowing popularity of the ‘pro-Democratic’ rock music, back in the day the voters would often go conservative with the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
But now the US voters are facing a tough conundrum through no fault of their own. Indeed, these are the upshots of a grave political crisis that escalated the traditional party rivalry into a dormant civil war. This has catapulted to the fore the two candidates that many would characterise as ‘both are worse’.
One of them is a very old man who struggles to tell Austria from Australia and even his wife from his sister. He is responsible for the country’s painful military losses, all sorts of economic woes and an unprecedented migration crisis. However, mainstream media urges American voters to think of this patriarch leading a deeply corrupt family as someone capable of saving the American democracy from the ‘fascist threat’.
In all fairness, his rival is far from being a real ‘fascist threat’, but he is also the guy with a spotty track record and narcissistic leanings who is in the habit of blurting out patently inane statements and giving promises he has no conceivable way of fulfilling.
Whenever a nation is forced to have a choice that bad, even a coin toss may appear to be a sensible way-out. Under the circumstances, relying on the opinion of the insanely popular songstress does not seem like a worse strategy.
Or rather, this strategy would be perfectly acceptable if it were not for the risk of starting World War III, which would be a nuclear standoff, not entirely improbable given the current US containment policy towards Russia’s Ukraine stance.
However bad a choice, Trump is the candidate of peace who has, in no uncertain terms, doubled down on his vow to end the hostilities and reach a mutually acceptable deal with Moscow. Maybe he will not be successful in his endeavour because of ‘the Swamp’s’ intrigue, but at least he is poised to try.
Biden, by contrast, is the frontman for the party of war, embracing the tactics that have already led to a second cold war and an armed conflict in Europe. As there is no sign of him stopping, Taylor Swift should think harder whether she wants to sing at a UN peace summit or croon in front of the active-duty soldiers with a mushroom cloud for a backdrop.
If we bracket the names of Trump and Biden, this is a rather straightforward choice.