Tuesday night, Taylor Swift invited her fans and social media followers to "Speak Now" — or at least in November.
And hundreds of thousands appear to have listened.
According to a spokesperson for the United States General Service Association, Taylor Swift’s post-debate Instagram post led to hundreds of thousands of visitors to vote.gov, a federal voter information clearinghouse that provides a portal to state- or territory-level voter registration.
Swift's unique vote.org link referred 405,999 visitors to the voter information site for the 24 hours her Instagram Story post was live, a GSA spokesperson said.
Unsurprisingly, vote.org gets more traffic in presidential election years than in other years. Between Sept. 10, 2023, and Sept. 10, 2024, vote.org had about 4.7 million visitors.
But the Swift bump just hits different. From Sept. 10 to Sept. 11, vote.org totaled 726,523 visitors, a wild traffic explosion. For reference, over the previous seven days — Sept. 3 to Sept. 9 — the site averaged about 30,000 a day, for a 2321.74% bump in traffic.
Vote.gov doesn't register people to vote, but has information and links to help users learn how register to vote where they live.
Less than half an hour after the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump ended, Swift offered her endorsement to Harris in a Instagram photo post, with a link to vote.gov in her Instagram Story.
"I’m voting for Kamala Harris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos," Swift wrote. "I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate Tim Walz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades."
If you’re feeling deja vu, that’s not a coincidence: Swift’s Instagram post on Voter Registration Day 2023 last September led to more than 35,000 new voter registrations, according to nonprofit vote.org.
"Our site was averaging 13,000 users every 30 minutes," the site’s CEO, Andrea Hailey, said at the time.
Tuesday also wasn’t the very first night Swift has offered a political endorsement. In 2018, she backed a pair of Democratic candidates for Congress in her home state of Tennessee, breaking her previous silence on political matters.
Swift on Tuesday said she was spurred by Trump’s use of AI-generated images on social media, which purported a Swift-Trump endorsement.
Trump dismissed the news Wednesday, saying that Swift will "probably pay a price for it in the marketplace."
But Swift, the artist behind the highest-grossing concert tour in history, ended her endorsement ended with a sign-off — "Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady," a nod to comments made years ago by Trump's running mate JD Vance, which he sought to dismiss as sarcasm — signaling that may not be a concern for her.