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In less than a week, Swifties have turned their community into an online election headquarters for US vice president Kamala Harris—and the campaign wants in on the effort.
After President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection last week, Emerald Medrano, 22, flipped on the news. As he watched pundits yap about the Democratic ticket, he felt he had to do something. He had never been politically involved, but he had a popular Swift stan account. Not sure of what to do, he posted on X: “I feel like us U.S. swifties should mass organize and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous project 2025 would be to help get people’s butts down the polls.”
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Medrano received hundreds of replies and direct messages from other Swifties offering their support, largely motivated by civil rights, trans rights, and reproductive health care. Some had a background in politics. Others operated massive Swift stan accounts or worked in social media professionally. The fandom served as a social lubricant for the politically-curious Swiftie to get involved and leverage the skills they learned in the community for electoral means.
“The shared interest and knowledge of the fandom is definitely a really great way to bridge that connection over to civic engagement and political activism,” Madeline Miner, 22, a Swifties-for-Kamala social media coordinator, tells WIRED.
Since Medrano’s tweet, Swifties for Kamala has grown to more than 300 members, with thousands more applying to join their Discord server. The group has grown so quickly that it’s already undergone three “restructurings.” Now, it has more than 80,000 followers on TikTok, 48,000 on X, 16,000 on Instagram, and a Substack titled “Paint the Town Blue,” in reference to a Swift lyric. (Other pro-Harris Swiftie accounts have cropped up over the past week, but Swifties for Kamala is the largest.)
The group has four teams: communications, finance, outreach, and social. For social, the teams are assigned to platforms, each with its own lead. Rohan Reagan, 21, who already ran a successful Swiftie account on Instagram, leads the group’s efforts there. For years, Reagan was posting edits he made of Swift; now he’s making them of Harris.
“The reels, the posts, all of those are either created by me or I outsource it from someone else,” Reagan said. “We have a post online on the page right now that someone just did on their own and created all the research infographics on their own. So they brought it to me. I fixed it up a bit, and then posted.”
Before Reagan or any other social lead could create the edits, Leigh Bauer, 23, a social media coordinator, started building out the brand and voice of the account. Bauer drew inspiration from the fandom—specifically the official Swift fan account, @taylornation13, on X.
“They have this very distinct voice that shares news and updates and tells us when merch is happening and when albums are coming out and whatnot. But they also are really, really great about engaging with fans online,” Bauer said. “And so wanting to go off of that to continue to be another familiar voice that fans will understand … but also being a respectable voice.”
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The Harris campaign has shown interest in the Swifties too. Since the launch of Swifties for Kamala, says Reagan, the Harris team has held two calls with the group and are in contact with members of their team.
A Harris spokesperson did not confirm these calls, but tells WIRED that the campaign regularly holds similar stakeholder calls.
The relationship between Swifties for Kamala and the candidate mirrors previous online fandom organizing efforts, but at a national scale. Facing a tough primary in 2020, young people and various pop culture stan accounts began organizing for US senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, building a community known as the Markeyverse. In the weeks leading up to the election, the group held text banks over Zoom while playing some of their favorite music, including Swift. Markey won by more than 10 points.
Swifties for Kamala is making big plans ahead of November. The group is planning election-related events around future Eras Tour performances and finding new ways to engage with followers across social media. But for now, members are taking it slow and building out the infrastructure needed to support them through election day.
“We're also just trying to make sure what we're doing is sustainable, so it can keep going. We don't want to, I mean, obviously we want to jump in head first,” says Becca Young, 25, “We want to be doing a million things. We want to be helping as much as possible, but we want to make sure that we're starting here in July, and we're there all the way through November, and maybe even further.”
Around 40,000 Black women gathered on Zoom hours after Harris announced she was running for the Democratic Party’s nomination. In that one call, they raised $1.6 million and inspired dozens of other identity groups to come together. On Monday night, White Dudes for Harris invited rumored vice presidential candidates like Governor Tim Walz and celebrities like Mark Hamill, Mark Ruffalo, and Josh Gad, to speak. According to the group, 193,000 people attended the call and raised $4.2 million for the campaign.
“We've seen a cultural shift in the past year or so, especially like last summer with the Barbie movie, the Eras Tour, and the Beyoncé extravaganza. People are really taking the interests of women and girls seriously now, and obviously, it's not all just women and girls, but a lot of [Swift’s] fan base is, so having something that caters so much to the passions of these people who have not been taken seriously for so long has lit a fire under them,” says Miner.
Swifties have racked up a number of big wins in recent years too. When Ticketmaster opened up sales for Eras Tour tickets, the site bugged out and made it nearly impossible for fans to get tickets. Their outrage led to congressional investigations into Ticketmaster where several senators rattled off Swift lyrics in their opening remarks.
“I saw so many people tagging us in these accounts that were tweeting about how once you get the Swifties involved, it's over for Donald Trump, because they're so big, and they have such a big influence,” says Miner. “Like the Eras Tour having such a big economic impact on all the cities it was going to and how much we changed Ticketmaster with kind of breaking that down. People realized what a force we all were and it's cool that we're using that for good now, 100 percent.”
