CDo you know the “Taylor Swift effect”? These are phenomena, each more improbable than the last, that the American singer provokes due to her unparalleled popularity. The list is staggering. Just like the way she occupies land other than her own, without seeming to touch it. The stakes are high.
It is true that she has strengths. At 34, she holds a string of records. She is the most listened to singer of all time or the most downloaded in the world – 228 million downloads in twenty-four hours of her latest album, 1989 (Taylor’s Version), released in October 2023. But she is not only a voice broadcast in train stations, airports or pharmacies. Or a deciphered author at Harvard and other universities – the one in Melbourne is organizing a “swiftposium” in February. Or a name given to donuts or cocktails. Nor a curiosity: two concerts in Seattle (United States), in July 2023, caused a seismic disturbance of magnitude 2.3 – due to the dance steps of 144,000 people in a stadium.
All this is small matter compared to the looming stakes. Will she have an influence on the American presidential election on November 5 by supporting Democrat Joe Biden? Long discreet on politics, she called for voting for him in 2020, accusing Trump of“fanning the flames of white supremacism and racism.”
But his aura has increased again. She is the magazine’s 2023 personality of the year Time. Seventy percent of Americans love it. After the singer called, in September 2023, her 279 million subscribers to her Instagram account to go to Vote.org to register on the electoral lists, the platform recorded 35,000 registrations on the same day ( + 23% compared to the standard). This clean-cut blonde with blue eyes, playing the good and simple girl, singing country (conservative music) as well as pop, has the perfect profile to attract young undecided or abstentionist voters living in ordinary suburbs.
The hatred has gone up a notch
Taylor Swift is even more of a political asset since she recently revealed that her partner is an American football star, white and very « terroir » Travis Kelce, of the Kansas City Chiefs, who will play in the Super Bowl on February 11, one of the most important identity events in the United States. The romance ignites the rock star’s community, following her to the stadiums, mingling with a rather conservative audience.
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