It’s an important lesson for politicians: never give your enemies a name. Hillary Clinton did it, disastrously, with her off-the-cuff announcement about a “basket of deplorables”. Did it cost her the election? On its own, no, but it certainly didn’t help. Trump supporters, on the other hand, embraced it. Female fans labelled themselves “adorable deplorables” and hand-embroidered the slogan on baseball caps.
Eight years later, the Republicans are suffering from the same mistake, although this time the fatal phrase emerged years before the campaign. In 2021, J.D. Vance (then a Republican candidate for the Senate) gave an interview to Tucker Carlson (then a Fox News host), in which he attacked what he had described as the “childless Left”. The USA, Vance told Carlson, was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.
Childless cat ladies. Regrettably for Vance and the Republicans in general, it is a great phrase: pointed, memorable — and ripe for the reclaiming. Which is why, when Taylor Swift declared her backing for the Democrats on Tuesday, she did it by posting a picture to Instagram of herself holding one of her three cats (the cat in question is Benjamin Button, a ragdoll). And she signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” Elon Musk responded on X with a gallant offer to impregnate her, which will do little to diminish accusations that Trump supporters are weird.
Her announcement was hardly surprising. Swift backed Biden/Harris in 2020 and has previously lent her support to liberal causes including gun control and abortion rights. But it was an anxiously awaited one. Other pop stars had declared their affiliation long ago: Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat” almost as soon as the vice-president declared her run for the White House. And hours before Swift’s post, The Guardian published “Is Taylor Swift a secret Trump supporter?” The evidence for this was a photograph of her hugging a friend who had liked a Trump post on Instagram. (McCarthyism, apparently, can change its shape but never die.)
And it is a significant move. Swift’s cultural heft makes her a fearsome political force. When she shared a link to a voter registration site in 2023, there were 35,252 new registrations that day; notably, this included a 115% increase in 18-year-olds, who are more likely to vote Democrat. Swift’s audience also skews female, which is significant for an election held in the shadow of the Dodds Supreme Court decision which undid Roe vs Wade. Bluntly, the more women vote, the harder it becomes for Trump to win.
But even though Swift has embraced her electoral power now, she’s historically been cautious. As a young singer-songwriter on the Nashville scene, she cultivated an apolitical stance. One of the country acts she had first been inspired by as a child were the Dixie Chicks (now simply called the Chicks): in 2003, their career was all but destroyed after a member of the band criticised George W. Bush during a concert. “They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what,’” said Swift in 2019.