Taylor Swift, the most famous childless cat lady in the world, drove a huge spike in traffic to the U.S. government’s Vote.gov information site following her endorsement of VP Kamala Harris for president.
On Tuesday, Sept. 10, Swift said in an Instagram post that she will be voting for Harris in the November U.S. presidential election, an endorsement that came shortly after the conclusion of the debate between Harris and Donald Trump. “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote.
Swift — who currently has more than 284 million followers on Instagram — shared a link to Vote.gov in an Instagram Story (which vanishes after 24 hours).
In the 24 hours after Swift’s post Tuesday evening, Vote.gov saw 405,999 visitors referred directly from the singer’s Instagram account, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, which runs the site, told Variety. (The GSA was able to tally the visitors using a custom URL created and shared by Swift.) That’s more than 10 times the traffic generated over a recent one-week period: From Sept. 3-9, the site received about 30,000 visitors per day. The Swift-fueled traffic bump also represented more than half of all visitors to Vote.gov between Sept. 10 and 11 (726,523 visitors total).
It’s unknown how many of the visitors driven by Swift’s post subsequently registered to vote, but according to the GSA on Sept. 11 there were more than 27,000 new registrations via Vote.gov (as well as more than 80,000 people who verified their registration status). Vote.gov does not allow people to register to vote; rather, the site directs U.S. residents to their state election websites for state-specific voting information and they must register directly with their state.
At the MTV VMAs on Wednesday evening — where Swift won seven awards, bringing her all-time tally to a record-breaking 30 — spoke on stage and reiterated her call for Americans to vote. “If you are 18, please register to vote,” she told the VMAs audience. “It’s an important election.”
The GSA says Vote.gov is “a trusted source for accurate, official voting information from the U.S. government to the American public. Our mission is to make it easy for all eligible voters to understand how to register and vote.”
Swift, in her endorsement of Harris, said that she had recently become aware “that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
Swift’s Instagram post backing Harris and her VP running mate, Tim Walz, has more than 10 million likes as of Thursday. The pop superstar signed the post “Childless Cat Lady,” alluding to comments by Trump’s VP running mate, JD Vance, who in 2022 said the Democratic party is led “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”
Source Agencies
