Social media outlets have given a single person the ability to reach millions through a digital screen. With the up and coming midterm election, celebrities have promoted voting to a young demographic presenting the question: how much of an impact will influencers have on the outcome of the election?
On Wednesday October 17th, Taylor Swift took to her 112 million followers and posted a slide of two photos of polaroids. One of her patriotic painted toes, with the colors red, white, and blue. Her caption promoted early voting in Tennessee with Swift looking back on the past, “[s]omething I wish I knew about when I was 18 and voting for the first time: EARLY VOTING” Shortly after, Vote.org revealed that Swift’s post drove up voter registration amongst 18 to 29 year olds in a short two day period specifically around 160,000 young adults registered to vote.
Swift’s instagram stories have turned into a series of #justvoted posts. Ranging from voters who voted for the first time, voters in her hometown of Tennessee, to moms and families who voted together. Swift has taken her influence on social media to promote voting and particularly promote voting to the younger generation.
On October 9th at the American Music Awards, Swift used her acceptance speech to promote midterm election voting by stating, “Get out and Vote, and I love you guys”.
Though her voting campaign initially seemed to take a politically neutral stance, on October 7th Swift took to instagram and posted a long paragraph declaring her political opinions. Swift states, “I cannot support Marsha Blackburn. Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me… I will be voting for Phil Bredesen for Senate and Jim Cooper for House of Representatives”. Swift’s post racked up over two million likes.
Looking back a few months, in April Kanye West took to twitter, tweeting to his 28.7 million followers “You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him… He is my brother”. This particular tweet has 79,284 retweets and 326,902 likes as of October 27th. His message had a reach of almost half a million people.
On the same day Swift gave her speech at the American Music Awards, Rihanna took to instagram posting a chart of the states and the last day to register to vote for each state. Rihanna told her 65.7 million instagram followers that “[October 9th was] the last day in 14 states to REGISTER TO VOTE”. Capitalizing the words “register to vote”. Similarly, Mark Ruffalo told his 8 million followers to vote, John Legend to his 8.9 million followers, and Mark Hamill told is 3.4 millions followers. These are just a small amount of celebrities using their following to promote voter registration, the importance of voting, and occasionally which parties and candidates they support. Between Swift, West, Rihanna, Ruffalo, Legend, and Hamill, these six celebrities, when calculated their combined reach is about a whopping 818 million followers.
This number is astonishing for the combined number of the reach of these six influencers was able to reach 9 figures. When Swift first posted, Vote.org reported that around 160,000 people registered to vote. That means that .000142857% of her followers registered to vote. When taking the combined 818,000,000 followers and taking that exact percentage it would be hypothesized that around 1,168,571 people took some sort of action in support of the election. Nevertheless, with each post a celebrity reaches millions through an electronic screen. With every caption, every tweet, at least one person will be influenced to be a part of the voting process and thus the outcome of the midterm election can be easily impacted.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/10/taylor-swift-voting-instagram/574300/
– Written by Grace Wang