Taylor Swift vs. Brat Summer
A look at Popular Culture in Campaigning and the celebrity endorsement
Taylor Swift “broke her silence” (a phrase that, nowadays, means “just said a thing”) about the 2024 Presidential election on the night of the presidential debate, pretty much immediately following the smackdown. I guess calling it a smackdown reveals my stances on this race. Oh well. He got ragdolled. Sorry not sorry.
Taytay barely waited 5 minutes after the candidates had exited the stage before she posted a long caption on a photo from her Time Magaziner photoshoot, a post that Tim Walz himself described as “eloquent and exactly the kind of courage we need in America right now,” (Look it up! He said it! About TAYLOR!! Okay I’m good) and the post endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Some commented that Taylor was a bit late to the party. However, the fact remains that Taylor Swift’s endorsement (and the subsequent endorsements from many celebrity legends including Stevie Nicks) did more to gain voters for the Harris-Walz campaign than anyone else this election cycle, including the Harris campaign itself.
In fairness to the critics, Swift’s endorsement had been the topic of discussion since AI images of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump circulated Truth Social, and then the entire internet. While the images looked fake, and came around the same time that Swift was occupied by other matters (canceling her Vienna tour dates due to credible terrorist threats), the images troubled Swifties and worried voters alike. Proud Swiftieswho had seen the netflix documentary “Miss Americana” had little doubt as to where she stood, but the fake images orchestrated by Trump highlighted the lack of statement from Swift herself, and showed that the Taylor Swift endorsement was in high demand. Worried voters, who may never have heard a Taylor Swift song in their lives, were aware of Swift’s power over the youngest generation of voters, and were watching polls that had Harris and Trump inexplicably neck and neck. Swift’s famously cryptic instagram work hinting at an endorsement of Harris was fun, but didn’t seem to be getting the job done.
While the weight of the celebrity endorsement concept has been contested, Swifties in the know about how hard the singer fought in the past to speak out about her political ideology were eagerly awaiting a statement of some kind. Additional weight had been given to this particular endorsement by the posts from Trump. A candidate in this race wanted her endorsement so badly he conjured one out of thin air. Trump was not the only one attempting to gain the attention of young voters for his campaign leading up to the debate. The AI posts and subsequent clamoring for Swift’s statement was not the first time the waves of pop music have crashed against the immovable shores of our political system this election cycle. Nearly the very moment Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris, Charli XCX, the british pop artist behind the summer anthem “Brat”, declared her endorsement, stating “Kamala IS brat”. @kamalahq, the official page for her presidential campaign, began posting and reposting the brat memes and the coconut tree memes. The traction and engagement that those memes garnered from the younger electorate was instant and continuous.
This was terrifying and fascinating to me, because I lived and died with every negative headline about Hillary Rodham Clinton leading up to the 2016 election. A big part of the criticism, that voters my age at the time in particular latched on to, was that she was overusing memes. Memes placing her face over Steve Buscemi’s in a widely circulated photo from the actor’s brief stint on 30 Rock days were all over the internet. In the scene the meme is taken from, Buscemi holds a skateboard and wears a hoodie, and tells a group of teenagers, “Hello fellow kids.” With the placement of Clinton’s face on his, the message could not have been clearer. The exhaustive meme use was not endearing her to young voters. “We find you condescending”, the meme’s popularity clearly said. “Your attempts to connect with us are transparent and ineffective,” and “You’re not funny and we are tired of you” could be read into the subtext of this meme without much of a stretch of the imagination.
So when I saw that Harris’s campaign leaned into the “brat summer” trend so aggressively, I couldn’t help the well of acidic anxiety that rose in my throat. Memories swirled of cringing when Clinton said there were hot sauce packets in her purse, and turning my phone to go breathe deeply for a moment when I saw yet another meme mocking her for just trying to get young Democrat voters to care enough to go to a polling place. I felt for her. It has always been a hard job. The thing that troubled me about what the Harris campaign was doing was that it was essentially wasted. It doesn’t take much effort to get the average gen z social media user to interact with your content if it makes them laugh, or feel as though they are, with just two clicks of a button, participating in the process. That is the first step. The social media version of saying “hey how are you doing?”. That, for the Harris campaign’s social media team, was also the final step. They ended it there.
As people continued to express interest in Harris and what her campaign was posting, and I stopped being so nervous she was going to scare everyone off barely more than 2 weeks into her candidacy, I found myself feeling offended instead. I was offended as a former teenage voter, who was condescended to and fed memes upon memes with Clinton’s face on them, videos parodying her attempts to get my attention, only for her to lose. I was left with the impression that young voters of America had sent a clear message- that politicians seeking our vote could share real information with us and we would welcome the chance to feel included. The message was that using our memes and our generation’s slang thrown into speeches and events were neither necessary nor impactful in gaining our attention. I was so offended because it seemed as though Harris’s campaign had looked at what Clinton had done and not learned from the example of what not to do. Harris was just getting lucky. Instead of content fatigue, she was met with excitement. Instead of muting her posts, people were eating them up, and the Harris campaign stopped short of following through on the vital next step once they had their audience.
It should be noted that unless I, and several professors of mine, have grossly misunderstood federal election law, a political candidate can encourage the electorate to vote as much as they want. However, in all these memes and videos posted in an effort to reach young voters, the official campaign page did not tell young people to vote, to register to vote, or direct them to the website where they can find their polling place and register. The excitement drummed up by the effective use of pop culture references was devoid of any real information about key issues, why that age group in particular should care about the election, and did not remind them of the importance of exercising their constitutional right to cast a vote. In this way, the outreach will, in my opinion, be ultimately ineffective. The style of outreach employed by the Harris campaign drummed up exactly enough interest to make gen z voters feel included, but not urgently enough that they will rush to the polls. My prediction is that they will ultimately forget to make a plan for voting day, citing family commitments, work, etc., conveniently forgetting that legally, their place of work is required to allow them to vote without penalty from management. They will forget because in their minds, by sharing one of many posts targeting their interest, they will have participated in the process and following through on election day will be a forgotten second step to their activism. Harris’s “brat summer” may have sparked interest, but I very much doubt that they have done the work necessary to turn that interest into votes. Taylor Swift, though. She might get the job done.
For more information on the “Brat Summer” phenomenon and the use of Chappell Roan’s iconic work in the Harris campaign social media presence, this story on CBS News is an excellent primer.
