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No wonder GOP lost it: Taylor Swift registered 65,000 voters in 1 day
Eric Boehlert
10-09-18


The pop star ended her silence on politics — and Republicans completely melted down.

Fans are heeding pop star Taylor Swift’s political call to action for November.

Following an impassioned Instagram post to her army of fans on Sunday night, where she stressed the need for equality, and urged fans to vote Democratic and register to vote, 65,000 people did just that in a 24-hour period.

The eruption of activism will likely only further enrage conservatives who lashed out at Swift after she posted her first-ever political message. There, she specifically condemned the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Taylor’s home state of Tennessee.

“I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love,” Swift stressed in her social media post.

After imploring fans to “go to vote.org,” the site landed 155,000 unique visitors in a 24-hour period, up from its normal daily traffic of 14,000. Of those visitors, 65,000 registered to vote.

That one-day total is more than the site registered for the entire month of August.

The conservative media movement is still aching from the development.

Turning Point USA Executive Director Charlie Kirk seemed to be especially crushed by Swift’s endorsement, taking to Twitter for an extended public meltdown on the subject, claiming the global superstar had “no idea” of what she was talking about.

He then continued his whining on Fox News and Fox Business, where he bitterly denounced the singer as a know-nothing charlatan.

For some strange reason, white nationalists had convinced themselves Swift was secretly one of them.

“Users on 4chan, the online message board popular with the white supremacists and white nationalists who make up the alt-right, had long used Swift’s silence about politics to push a baseless theory that she was secretly a white supremacist, hailing the blond-haired, blue-eyed pop star as ‘the Aryan princess,'” Business Insider notes.

The National Republican Senate committee also felt the wound acutely, and lashed out on Twitter.

NRSC press release: "If you haven’t heard, multimillionaire pop star Taylor Swift came down from her ivory tower to tell hardworking Tennesseans to vote for Phil Bredesen."

— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 8, 2018
The Taylor-led voter surge is playing out as signs multiply that Republicans are facing a very bad November, especially in the House.

“The Republican House majority continues to show signs of collapsing, with Democrats steadily gaining ground toward erasing the 23-seat margin and ending eight years of GOP control,” Politico reports.

Taylor’s move also comes as rapper Kanye West is expected to visit the White House this week. An unlikely Trump supporter, West has bewildered the hip-hop community with his vocal support of the Republican.

But unlike Swift, West doesn’t seem to be leading any sort of organized, grassroots campaign to get followers involved in the electoral process.