Vote.org tallies more registrations in 24 hours than the entire month of August.
It may have prompted an uninformed and dismissive comment from the president, but Taylor Swift’s social-media post in support of Tennessee Democratic candidates helped lead to a giant 24-hour spike in voter registrations at Vote.org.
“We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift’s post,” Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org, told Buzzfeed. That’s more than the entire month of August (56,669). The singer took to Instagram Sunday to say she will vote for Phil Bredesen for Tennessee Senate and Jim Cooper for House of Representatives, and specifically opposed incumbent senator Marsha Blackburn.
“Vote.org saw [Tennessee] registrations spike specifically since Taylor’s post,” Guthrie told the site. The organization has received 5,183 in the state so far this month — at least 2,144 of which were in the preceding 36 hours, she said on Monday night, up from 2,811 new Tennessee voter registrations for the entire month of September and just 951 in August. Guthrie said the site had also seen a big uptick in the number of visitors since Swift’s post, with 155,940 unique visitors in the 24 hours following.
“Thank God for Taylor Swift,” said Guthrie.
Despite the president’s claim on Monday that “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about” Blackburn, the singer showed a detailed awareness of the senator’s policies in her Instagram post, noting that Blackburn “voted against equal pay for women. She voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape. She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples. She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”