The deeper meaning of Taylor Swift's democratic mic drop

BY Jennifer Weiner

For a certain swath of America, the big news of Tuesday night's presidential debate wasn't made by Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but by Taylor Swift. As you've probably heard by now, mere moments after the candidates left the stage, she went on Instagram and, in a move many Democrats had prayed for, endorsed Ms Harris. "She fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them," Ms Swift wrote to her 283 million followers.

The endorsement was not a surprise, nor were the responses: Democrats exulted. Republicans fumed. Elon Musk chimed in with something deeply creepy.

Many pundits described Ms Swift's statement as a knockout punch -- the cherry on the garbage sundae that was Mr. Trump's Tuesday night. Ms Swift, they said, had smartly waited until the former president was wounded, down on the floor whimpering, in order to deliver that final blow. "The timing on it is absolutely exquisite. The wording of it is flawless," said the MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell.

But Ms Swift's decision to give her blessing so soon after the debate left others scratching their heads. Ms Harris had a great night. Why not let her ride that wave? Wait a few days, let the news cycle run until Mr. Trump staggers back to his feet, then drop the endorsement for maximum impact.

Some looked back, wondering why Ms Swift hadn't come out for Ms Harris in August, when Trump supporters used artificial intelligence to whomp up a fake image of Ms Swift endorsing him, and he boosted the image as though it were real. Or at the Democratic National Convention, when rumors abounded that Ms Swift or Beyoncé, or perhaps Ms Swift and Beyoncé, would be the surprise guests?

Social media had theories

Maybe Ms Swift wanted to divert attention from friends such as Brittany Mahomes, who's been under fire for liking (then seemingly un-liking) a post by Mr. Trump that promised, among other things, to "Keep men OUT of women's sports," "Deport pro-Hamas radicals" and "build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country." Maybe Ms Swift wanted to lean into her relatability, so that we could imagine her on her couch, watching the debate just like us regular folk, listening carefully, taking notes and clicking "post" because she couldn't wait.

Personally, I like to imagine that Ms Swift saw how Ms Harris's dismissiveness and humor, her decision to treat Mr Trump as not an existential threat but an unserious man, got under his skin, and she couldn't resist giving that wounded bear one last poke.

The Harris/Walz campaign says it learned about Ms Swift's statement at the same time the rest of us did, though the fact that it wasted less than an hour before selling Swiftian friendship bracelets left a different impression. Regardless, Ms Swift has a history of thinking long and hard before lending her name to a cause.

In 2016, when some of her fellow pop stars were all in for Hillary Clinton, Ms Swift stayed on the fence. Something changed when she was slapped with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit from a man she accused of groping her. (She countersued for $1 -- and won.) "I was so angry," she recalled in her 2020 Netflix documentary "Miss Americana." "I really couldn't stop thinking about it. And I just thought to myself, 'Next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you want to say.'"

That next time arrived in 2018, when the Democrat Phil Bredesen ran against Marsha Blackburn for the US Senate in Ms Swift's home state, Tennessee. Despite the strong objections of Ms Swift's team and her father, all caught on camera in a dramatic scene, she endorsed Mr. Bredesen. "This is something I know is right," she said. "I need to be on the right side of history." Ms Blackburn won, but Ms Swift had found her voice, and went on to endorse Joe Biden in 2020.

Staying above the fray might make sense for stars counting every fan and every sale. A 2023 poll commissioned by The Hollywood Reporter found that 25 percent of respondents believed that "celebrities should not express their opinions about political and social issues to the public." Since then there has been healthy debate about whether those opinions make any difference in the voting booth. In a recent essay for Times Opinion, the critic B.D. McClay argued that as appealing as it is to imagine that "a superstar like Ms Swift might come around on a white horse to sway the electorate," the truth is that "celebrity endorsements have limited power to sway races."

That is not how some of Ms Swift's critics received Tuesday's September Surprise. "You can kiss your sales to the Republican audience goodbye, Taylor," said Megyn Kelly. "Hope you enjoyed them while you had them."

Ms Swift's snarky sign-off -- "Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady," a clear reference to JD Vance's 2021 remarks about "childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives" -- was a hint that she isn't too worried.

For those of us of a certain age, it was also a reminder of another time when conservatives came for the single ladies. It didn't go well.

Mr. Vance was only 7 years old in May of 1992, when Dan Quayle -- another youngish member of a presidential ticket who'd been celebrated as the future of the party -- went after a sitcom character named Murphy Brown. Played by Candice Bergen, Brown was a TV news anchor who unexpectedly became a mother without first becoming a wife. Pearls were clutched. Knives were sharpened.

"Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong," Mr. Quayle said in a speech. "It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice.'"

That September, when the series' new season aired, Murphy Brown gave her rebuttal. In an episode of the show she addressed Mr. Quayle's remarks directly, saying, "Unfortunately, it seems that for him, the only acceptable definition of a family is a mother, a father and children. And in a country where millions of children grow up in nontraditional families, that definition seems painfully unfair."

Murphy Brown had the last laugh. Seventy million viewers tuned in -- which, The Washington Post observed, was "about 31 million more than the votes the Bush/Quayle ticket got six weeks later when they lost re-election."

Ms Swift's endorsement may not swing the needle for the tiny sliver of persuadable voters in the handful of swing states. If people want to make their decisions based on something other than a pop star's Instagram post, more power to them. But that post, with its tongue-in-cheek-y humor, raises the hope that the joy Ms Harris has been running on might get us to a place that attacks never could.