Taylor Swift’s coveted support went to President Biden in 2020. A shadowy figure in an Instagram photo led some fans to make the leap that she will champion Kamala Harris.
Are they just seeing things, or does that silhouette of a Taylor Swift backup dancer resemble Vice President Kamala Harris?
The internet army of Swift fans often treats decoding the pop star’s Easter eggs as a part-time job, so speculation spread when some suggested that a photo Ms. Swift had posted to Instagram from her Eras Tour, which has been crisscrossing Europe this summer, could be a hint at support for a certain presidential ticket.
And yet, there has been no endorsement from Ms. Swift, who has increasingly thrown her outsize influence behind progressive politics. In October 2020, her pronouncement of support for Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not leave anything up for interpretation.
The photo in question, which Ms. Swift included in a post about her recent concerts in Warsaw, aligns with a standard transition from the tour in which her backup dancers — wearing pantsuits not unlike the kind that Ms. Harris happens to favor — strut offstage between songs.
Despite the counterarguments, some Swifties were convinced that the post was a coded message. A liberal segment of the fandom is eager for the singer to make her allegiances known, and the leap underscores Ms. Swift’s power as someone who can influence electoral politics in a single social media post. (In 2023, one Instagram post of hers led to 35,000 new voter registrations.)
A representative for Ms. Swift did not immediately respond to a question about the fandom’s reaction to the singer’s post.
Ms. Swift’s Democratic leanings and her supercharged cultural prominence on N.F.L. broadcasts last season have irritated supporters of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, some of whom have pushed conspiracy theories that her presence was meant to boost President Biden’s now-scrambled re-election. Ms. Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, named Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota her running mate on Tuesday.
The chatter about Ms. Swift’s recent Instagram post revived debate over the role of a pop star in politics.
“If we’re going to pay that much money as consumers, you don’t need to serve up politics for that,” Harris Faulkner, the Fox News host, said on television after the speculation about the concert photo swept the internet. “When people pay to see you, just perform.”
The Eras Tour has been on its major European leg this summer. On Wednesday, three concerts in Vienna were canceled after Austrian officials announced the arrests of two men whom they accused of plotting a terrorist attack, saying that one of them had focused on several stadium shows Ms. Swift had planned for this week.
Ms. Swift had begun to openly flex her electoral influence toward November’s election — but not toward any specific candidate. In March, when Mr. Biden was still at the top of the ticket, Ms. Swift encouraged her millions of Instagram followers to make a plan to vote in the presidential primaries, in a nonpartisan message that urged fans to “vote the people who most represent YOU into power.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
