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Kamala Harris’ meteoric rise to the top of the Democratic ticket was unexpected. Two months ago, no one could have predicted it.
Well, almost no one.
On June 6, 2023, astrologer Laurie Rivers, who goes by the name AstroLaurie on TikTok and hosts the Awake Space podcast, posted a video saying that Kamala Harris “has the best transits, but no one wants to talk about her.” It’s one of several videos where Rivers makes predictions about political events like the Republican National Convention, the US presidential election, and natural disasters. And on X, Amy Tripp, who posts under the username Starheal, reposted a prediction from August 2020 where she predicted Harris would run for president.
The astrology influencers online say they knew Harris was coming, and their followers are loving it.
Rivers and Tripp are just two of many astrologers who, over recent years, have built followings on social media. As the US hurtles through a chaotic political season, astrologers online have used this moment to build their platforms, offering political predictions and explanations of the current moment, and using the language of the stars, they say, to interpret events as they unfold.
The use of astrology for politics is nothing new—Ronald Reagan famously consulted an astrologer during his presidency—but using the practice to publicly discuss and interpret world events, particularly politics, is a more recent phenomenon. “The past four years, I would say, is when I think political astrology prediction started to become so popular,” says Indigo Selah, an astrologer who also creates astrology content on TikTok for her more than 743,000 followers. Selah says she does not consider herself a political astrologer, or someone who has the expertise to predict political events using astrology using the position of planetary bodies at any given time, but does use her platform to talk about pop culture, relationships, and current events. “I think a lot of people are turning to astrology because there is a lot of fear, and they feel like there is so much at stake.”
Discussing politics, particularly in such a contentious election year, can also be a strategy to gain visibility online, especially if the topic is one that’s already going viral. But Selah says she’s wary about people using political predictions to boost their profiles. “A lot of times you really have to think about, is this something the astrologer is saying to get boosted on the algorithm or is this something that they’re really dedicated to doing?” says Selah, who cited Rivers as a practitioner whose work she particularly trusted.
“Any kind of marketing you're going to jump on, it's not specific to astrology. You're going to hit a trend,” says Rivers. Talking about politics, she says, “is to get people's attention and show my accuracy.”
“You want to talk about what your audience is interested in,” says Tripp, who got her start on X before expanding to TikTok and Instagram. “The more eyes that are on you, the better you do, business-wise. Because this is my livelihood. Since I have gotten more followers, and I do talk about politics, I would say that has been one of the most engaging subjects I have brought up.” Like Rivers, Tripp says being right on predictions is good for business. Though she says she doesn’t like former president Donald Trump, she has predicted he will win the election.
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“I could always be wrong. I have been wrong before. And I think every astrologer has been wrong before,” she says.
The strategy seems to be working. Rivers says that in the weeks following the June 21 presidential debate and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, she saw her following on TikTok jump by 30,000—she now has more than 200,000 followers on the app. She also added 466 people to her paid tier on Patreon, where she charges between $5 and $22 per month.
Joe Theodore, an astrologer on TikTok who started his account in mid-July, now has nearly 10,000 followers. His first video, in which he predicted that Harris would win the election, garnered more than 350,000 views. “The couple of videos I put on there have been just blowing up a little, but I didn't expect that at all,” he says.
Though astrology itself has been practiced in some form or another for thousands of years, it has seen a resurgence in popularity, driven largely by millennials and Gen Zers. In 2019, investor David Birnbaum told the New York Times that he estimated the “mystical services market” was worth upwards of $2 billion. In 2021, the astrology app Co-Star raised $15 million and has been downloaded more than 5 million times on the Google Play Store since launching in 2017. The Chani app, launched by astrologer Chani Nicholas in 2020, reached more than a million downloads in 2023. Many of the astrologers who spoke to WIRED teach courses online or have their own apps as well.
Rivers acknowledges that seeking out astrological predictions, particularly around politics, could easily lead users down a conspiracy rabbit hole. “People, when they are scared, gravitate to belief. And people feel very powerless,” she says. “It is so important to understand how to communicate in ways that are responsible.”
New Age spirituality, of which astrology is often considered a part, has been an entry point into conspiracies like QAnon and is correlated with anti-vaccine beliefs. “We’ve seen how conspiracy, elections, politics, health, wellness, crystals, protein shakes all kind of came together in a swirl of connectivity because of the way platforms were making suggestions,” says Jiore Craig, senior fellow of digital integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“Our algorithms are pointed toward outrage and engagement,” says Jessica Lanyadoo, a professional astrologer and host of the astrology podcast Ghost of a Podcast who has 117,000 followers on Instagram. “The best way to get somebody engaged is to feed them conspiracy theories and cultish content, which astrology can be for some people, depending on the astrologer and depending on the motivations for the person who's consuming astrology content.”
Nowhere is this pipeline more evident than in the recent case of astrology influencer Danielle Johnson, who had more than 100,000 followers on X where she posted under MysticxLipstick. Johnson had spent the better part of a decade building a platform talking about astrology on social media, but tweets toward the end of her life indicate that Johnson believed antisemitic conspiracy theories and conspiracies about Covid-19. In the hours before the April 8 solar eclipse earlier this year, Johnson killed her partner and two children before taking her own life. Her last post on X was a repost from a QAnon account, warning people not to look at the eclipse, and that “something big is coming.” On April 5, three days before the eclipse, Johnson had posted, “WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE. EVERYONE WHO HAS EARS LISTEN. YOUR TIME TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS NOW.”
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But several astrologers who spoke to WIRED, including Lanyadoo and Rivers, said that they see astrology as a language to reach people who may otherwise not be interested or engaged in politics, and bring them into the conversation in a proactive way.
Earlier this month, Texas-based activist Becky Bullard launched the Civic Mystics, an initiative to help educate people about local and down ballot races. Bullard, who grew up Baptist, says she came to astrology as a tool for “meaning making” during the pandemic. She says that tapping into the growing popularity of astrology and mysticism is a way to build a community that can last beyond a single election.
“I think [astrology] is a place where people can find a political home that feels more natural to them than like a party or a lot of these other more traditional organizations that exist,” she says.
Lanyadoo regularly talks about political issues–like Covid-19, the war in Gaza, or racial justice–on her podcast, things she says she’s received pushback on from her listeners. But she says she feels it’s important to keep talking about politics, even when people in her audience disagree with her, because other people may not be consuming reliable political content elsewhere. “I have had many people reach out to me asking me where their polling place was,” she says. “Reaching out to me, an astrologer!”
During the 2020 presidential elections, Lanyadoo launched Zodiac the Vote, a website that included a guide instructing people on how to survive Mercury in retrograde as well as how to register to vote or call their representatives. (Whether she activates it again for this election cycle, she says, will depend largely on Harris’ stance on the war in Gaza and other social justice issues). She has also attempted to address some of the ways the spirituality and wellness communities can make people susceptible to conspiracies, releasing an episode discussing the pipeline from New Age spirituality to white nationalism and encouraging her audience to take the threat of Covid-19 seriously and “mask up.”
So far, Lanyadoo says, she has stayed away from making concrete political predictions, instead trying to encourage her listeners to get involved and have a sense of agency, even in difficult moments.
“If my whole entire audience believes that the sun and moon being opposite to each other is going to bring up big emotions, and it's a good time to, you know, clear your crystals, how could those same people not be willing to accept that how you engage directly affects the community you live in, the country you live in, the planet you live on?” says Lanyadoo.
Rivers also tries to remind people that “the future isn’t set in stone.” In her videos, she encourages people to get involved in their local communities, and pay special attention to downballot races during election season. But as for Trump? Rivers posted a video in August 2023 saying that Trump will never be president again. “And I stand by that,” she says.
