Taylor Swift, using her moment on stage at the VMAs to call on voters to register young voters, especially a registered vote. The night before that, she had announced her support for Kamala Harris, and one voter registration group has pointed to a huge spike in traffic and telling CNN the swift effect is undeniable. Let's look at all of this.
Harrington is here so undeniably great. You get to be the judge on that. this all gets to young voters.
Yeah. How much does she need help? How can.
Yeah. I mean, why does Kamala Harris welcome Taylor Swift's support? Why does she need the help?
Well, let's just point out something that I have been noting all along during this campaign and that is the underperformance that both Joe Biden and now even Kamala Harris has among young voters. All right. So this is a Democrat versus Trump margin among voters aged 18 to 29 are under the age of 30.
You go back four years ago at this point, look, Joe Biden had a 28 point advantage, a 28 point advantage over Donald Trump. Now, you look, when Joe Biden dropped out of the race, he was up by just seven points. Now come on.
Harris has improved on Joe Biden's standing. But look at this. She's only up by 15 points.
That is significantly less than Joe Biden was up at this point. Among the youngest voters in our electorate. It's only about half the margin that Joe Biden was pulling in.
So Kamala Harris will absolutely welcome in the support of Taylor Swift if she can move young voters there. All because the bottom line is Kamala Harris is, in fact, not doing as well among young voters as you might expect a Democrat to necessarily be doing based upon history. And what we heard from Taylor Swift last night was a call to register to vote, get involved.
How much of voter registration and why is that key? How important is it? Yeah, I mean, look, let's go to the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, all right?
And what we're going to do here is look at the Democratic advantage over Republicans in voter registration. This is party registration, registering as a Democrat or a Republican or unaffiliated. Look, if you go back to September of 2020, look among active voters in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
So Democrats would look at that, a 559,000 voter edge over Republicans. You jump. Now look, Democrats still having it, but look how much that's dropped.
It's now just 169,000. We're talking about the Republicans closing the gap by nearly 400,000 voters in just a four year time span. You go to North Carolina.
It's the same exact trend, right? You go back to September of 2020. You see Democrats with a 415,000 voter edge, and now they still hold an edge, but it's just 128,000.
And, of course, both of these states were determined by less than 100,000 voters back in 2020. So the bottom line is Republicans have been doing a significantly better job of registering voters than Democrats have been doing over the last four years, and getting folks to switch over from Democratic registration, Republican registration. So, yeah, Kamala Harris would definitely welcome the idea if Taylor Swift could bring in some more younger voters, Democratic leaning voters in the electorate, because the bottom line is, Republicans have been doing a heck of a lot better job of registering voters than Democrats have over the last four years.
I mean, that this this seems like a warning sign, you know, and the result of it, we have to wait and see, right? I mean, registration doesn't equal votes, but it's it is something of an indicator. It's an indicator.
Speaking of indicator, what is the swift effect. Yeah. What is the swift effect.
So look what do we know. Visitors to vote vote. gov due to Taylor Swift who clicked on that link on her Instagram post.
As of 2 p. m. yesterday.
Look how many folks clicked on that link. It was 338,000 folks. Now, not all those folks obviously are going to register to vote.
But the bottom line is this is a ton of folks who could be entering the electorate. Look, it's not necessarily something that's going to change the election if Donald Trump ends up winning by 2 or 3 points. But of course, the votes in these key battleground states are so, so tight that any help that you could get at all this is a clear effect of folks going and getting interested.
Register to vote. You saw last night Taylor Swift again urging folks to go register to vote. Democrats will take any of the help because the bottom line is, this election is so close that any small impact could be all the impact in the world.
Kate, are you saying turnout matters? Turnout, turnout, turnout. Sarah, you two groups.
All right. So how much of an impact might Taylor Swift make with young voters? I'm joined now by CNN political commentator Van Jones.
He's also a former Obama administration official. And Meridith McGraw, national politics correspondent for Politico. Van to you, we have to see if there is a Swifty effect.
I am coining the phrase Swifty effect. she certainly had an effect on people being interested in in registering to vote. We don't know if they actually did.
They did. Click on the link. Do you think she could make an impact?
Because you and I have talked about this before, usually celebrities don't really. Yeah, they don't really change people's minds. Well, here's the thing.
What she can do is to motivate people who might have been Kamala, curious to actually look at Kamala Harris as an option. And you do have a whole different world. You and I, we we watch television.
We we know the news. We we we hopefully everybody at home watches us every day. A lot of people don't, wake up, call a political class.
A lot of people don't follow every Donald Trump press conference. Everything they Kamala Harris, everything. And so and so when they're on in their Instagram, their TikTok with, Taylor Swift, if she moves her left elbow, it's massive news.
And so what you're doing is you're creating an onramp to politics for a generation of young people that may not honestly have been paying attention at all. And so just the mere fact that you get a little bit of a looky loo that people are looking over over there gives Kamala Harris advantage that she would not have had with people who are not political junkies. That is a heck of a lot of people.
337,000 people. No, no, no million people. Right, right.
I mean, oh, well, yeah. It's not something that they click on the link. They got like millions of people on.
Well, the 300,000 people that you said who clicked. But she has 300 million social media followers, right. She's got more social media followers in a lot of countries have citizens.
Right. That's a big deal. It's about the size of the United States.
Yeah, from all over the world. all right, I want to talk about swing states. because this is an incredibly close race.
And, you know, we need to recognize that, Debbie Dingell for, you know, congresswoman from Michigan, talked about her particular state, which was a huge state and a state that Hillary Clinton really needed and lost during her campaign against Donald Trump. Let's listen to what Debbie Dingell said. I think Michigan is a dead heat.
People know, but there's just a lot of people in the middle. I don't understand at times what people see in Donald Trump. They know what will happen to this country if he's president again.
But they believe strongly. And I it's just closer than people realize. Meredith, why is this race so incredibly, literally, historically close?
When you look at the polling right now, well, we're seeing that there still remain millions of undecided voters. And these people are, younger. They seem to skew a little bit male.
And there are a lot of, educated women who are in this group who still have not made up their minds about Harris or Trump, and both campaigns are working hard to try to win them over and also find out where they are in these key battleground states so that they can campaign there and they can tailor their messaging for them. And the Trump campaign and the Harris campaign are on this blitz in the next few days to try to go to these battleground states and make their message for the Harris campaign, to try to, you know, move forward with the momentum they have after the debate and for Trump to try to reset it and refocus on the policy issues that he failed to really talk about the other night, than I do to you, I don't remember. And maybe you do.
You've been doing this. You've been in this game a lot longer than I have. But that's true.
But I'm not sure I remember ever hearing someone say, we really have to focus on the male vote. Yeah, the men's vote. But the men are actually making a difference here and they are going towards Donald Trump.
Yeah, well, look, we have a gender gap. There's been one for a while. it's that's not new, but what still is, I think the intensity of it, I think Donald Trump is running a very masculine this campaign is not running a feminist campaign.
And she's not, you know, underscoring the fact that she's a woman Hillary Clinton did that didn't work out as well. But there is this kind of masculinist approach where you're going to what's called the manosphere, which is a bunch of, podcasts early aimed at men. he's trying to bring in a lot of the so-called bro culture, and it has to have an effect.
A lot of young men are saying that they don't feel that the Democratic Party sees them in a good light. They think the Democratic Party sees all men as being, quote unquote, toxic. and, and that's starting to have an effect.
And so, I think, Kamala Harris, has an opportunity to, to make up some ground here because I know her personally. nobody more enthusiastic about young men being successful than a former prosecutor. She.
Yeah, she's been somebody rooting for young men, in California to get jobs, to get out of trouble, to get on their way. That needs to be underscored more, given the dynamics of the race. I do want to talk to you about something that the campaign did, the Harris campaign did.
They went on Twitter as one does, and they trolled Donald Trump. I want you to see it. they said, this is our latest campaign ad and what is it?
It is simply the entire debate. there's that laugh again. This, this thing that's evidence, that's kind of, mic drop on that.
I love it. It's it's it's funny because like, I mean, she, she whooped them and, and I think that, Kamala Harris did something that no politician has been able to do in this whole past decade. Donald Trump has been eaten up.
Politicians like Pac Man, he went through 16 Republican governors and senators with them and made it look easy. Kamala Harris went out there and she just owned him on every question. And I just think that, she's right.
I think that's hilarious.
