Will Taylor Swift Endorse Kamala Harris for President?

Will Taylor Swift endorse Kamala Harris for president?

She wasn’t the rumored “surprise guest” at the Democratic National Convention, but there’s still time for Swift to endorse the VP ahead of the 2024 election, as some people are anticipating. If I were to place a bet, I’d say she probably will—but not in the way that Swifties for Kamala might hope.

One thing we can say pretty confidently is that Swift will not be endorsing Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump, for president—despite Trump falsely claiming that she had in August.

For the greater part of her career, Swift’s political leanings were a complete mystery. She didn’t make her first political statement until the 2018 midterm elections, when she urged her fans to vote for Democrats in her home state of Tennessee. In her Miss Americana documentary, Swift told her team that she regretted not speaking out against Trump in the 2016 election, and she wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. “I need to be on the right side of history.… Dad, I need you to forgive me for doing it, because I’m doing it,” she said in the doc.

During the 2020 election, Swift stayed pretty quiet about politics until October, when she officially revealed her endorsement of Joe Biden and VP Harris.

This year, many of Swift’s fans have gone ahead without her and endorsed Harris for president as a coalition called Swifties for Kamala, raising almost $140,000 on their kickoff call according to the Guardian, but Swift has yet to make an endorsement personally.

Swift hasn’t told her politically motivated fans to stop using her name, but she hasn’t given them public approval either. She also never responded to the false, AI-generated image of her appearing to endorse Trump, nor has she—a famously child-free cat lover—responded to VP nominee J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment.

Taken together with her history of extreme caution around politics, all of this leads me to believe that Taylor Swift likely will endorse Kamala Harris eventually, as Swifties for Kamala cofounder Irene Kim predicted to the New York Times, but don’t expect a surprise rally performance or a major fundraising drive. If Swift does decide to throw her weight behind Harris, I predict it will be in the form of a pre-written statement released shortly before Election Day.