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President Joe Biden is targeting social media influencers to boost his re-election bid, hoping to land the biggest star of them all: Taylor Swift. Swift endorsed Biden in 2020 and his campaign hopes to leverage its power this year to woo young voters and campaign cash, the New York Times reported.
After all, a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll this month found that 18% of voters said they were “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a candidate supported by Swift. The singer’s courtship is part of a larger effort by the Biden campaign to portray Donald Trump as a threat to abortion rights and personal freedoms.
With Trump having secured two victories in the Republican primary process, the Biden campaign is now targeting him as a competitor in the 2024 election. And to reach voters who may not consume traditional news – or who are turned off by elections that are a repeat four years ago – the Biden campaign is trying to reach these voters through social media, with videos from influencers.
The White House has invited social media influencers to talk about health care and other issues. Now they are seeking their help for a second term. When Biden was in California to raise money in December, his team met with a group of influencers to convince them to join his campaign.
And this month in North Carolina, Biden visited a man whose student loans had been canceled through a federal program. The man’s son posted a video of the presidential visit on TikTok, which attracted millions of views. Top Democrats have pushed the president to focus on Swift.
“Taylor Swift is great and unique,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in September. “What she has been able to achieve, just by encouraging young people to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think is extremely powerful.”
Swift has used her online influence to woo voters in the past. A September 2023 post encouraging her 272 million followers to register to vote resulted in more than 35,000 registrations. Biden will have plenty of opportunities to woo the singer.
Her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs reached the Superbowl with Sunday night’s playoff victory. If the Chiefs win the bowl, they will receive the traditional invitation from the White House to celebrate their victory. Players usually bring a partner to such an event. There will also be a state dinner for Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio on April 10 if the White House wants to send the singer an invitation. And there are issues that could interest Swift if she wants to get political. The singer was the victim of deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, explicit AI-generated deepfaked images of Swift were viewed tens of millions of times on X, formerly known as Twitter. It took hours to remove the messages, and at one point X stopped searching for the singer’s name to combat the images. The White House has expressed concern about the army of fake images on the Internet. “We are alarmed by reports of the spread of false images,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday. “We’re going to do what we can to address this problem.”