Getting Out the Vote

Who will get out and vote, and for whom, in the U.S. Presidential elections? There has been a lot of interest recently in celebrities endorsing one or other of the tickets. Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Elon Musk’s endorsements of Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance respectively have made headlines.

Celebrity endorsements of candidates are nothing new: Warren Harding was endorsed by film stars Al Jolson and Mary Pickford in 1920. But it’s difficult to prove whether they have much effect.

However Elon Musk’s endorsement of Donald Trump has unusual features. Musk announced he was backing the former President immediately after the first assassination attempt in July, and the Tesla boss, and world’s richest man, is reportedly putting his money where his mouth is. He has said he will donate $45 million a month to the campaign.

Celebrity endorsers such as Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney for the Democrats often help campaigns by using their notoriety to draw donors to fundraising events. But they don’t have access to the kind of money Musk has.

Musk is also in the unique position of being the boss of X (ex-Twitter). Again, press magnates like Rupert Murdoch have thrown the weight of their newspapers and media outlets behind candidates in the past. However, that is overt, writ large in headlines. Much has been made in recent elections about the influence of social-media algorithms pushing particular content to users. Musk is in charge of a very large algorithm.

Deep Fakes
Another novelty in social media since the 2020 election is the ubiquity of “deep fake” videos that go viral. When Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket, she said she felt she had to counter a fake video being spread by the Trump campaign.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site.”

If there is no proof that celebrity endorsements really influence who voters vote for, one way they can have a more measurable effect is in encouraging people to register to vote, and to actually cast their ballot.

When Taylor Swift posted on Instagram that she was going to vote for Kamala Harris, she was careful to encourage her followers to make up their own minds about who to vote for, and also to make sure they had registered to vote, giving a custom link to a government site.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered!”

Register and Vote
A spokesperson for the U.S. General Services Administration, which runs the vote.gov site, told Reuters that, “During the 24-hour period the Instagram story was live, the custom link to vote.gov created and shared by Swift received a total of 405,999 visitors.” Of course, not all of them will have actually registered to vote with the link, and some people who clicked the link may already have been registered, but if even a small portion of unregistered voters actually signed up, that would be a concrete effect.

Significantly, Swift’s followers tend to be young. In fact, they are part of 40 million Americans who are from Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2000s). They can potentially make up 20% of U.S. citizens who vote. Eight million Gen Zs will be eligible to vote for the first time at this election.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, overall voter turnout in the 2020 elections was 68.8%, but only 51.4% of 18-24-year-olds voted.

Pennsylvania, Swift’s home state, is a swing state, which has 19 electoral college votes. In 2020, Joe Biden won it with just 82,000 votes out of about 8.5 million registered voters. Anything which encourages more people to register and vote could potentially have a significant influence in a close-run race. And statistically, young women, Swift’s core audience, are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.

This short video from Voice of America looks at the youth vote over the recent election cycles and points out that Gen Z are the most diverse group of voters that the U.S. has seen.