With fewer than 70 days remaining until the midterm elections, one of the biggest voter registration organizations is expanding its efforts to make sure people are prepared to cast a ballot this fall.
And if you attend a sporting event or concert, there’s a decent chance you will interact with someone from the nonprofit, nonpartisan group HeadCount.
Last month, HeadCount announced a new partnership with Monumental Sports, which owns the Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics as well as the the Capital One Arena, to provide voter registration services at NBA, NHL and WNBA games in Washington, D.C., as well as concerts and other events at the venue.
HeadCount already works with some of the biggest music stars and corporate brands, and Director of Partnerships and Events Whitt Bell hinted there are more sports-oriented partnerships in the works.
“We’re basically taking our model that we use for concerts, festivals and community events and templatizing it, and putting it in literally a new arena,” Bell said.
Founded in 2004, HeadCount has helped more than 1 million people register to vote by partnering with performers like Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Dead and Co., supporting music festivals including Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and brands such as Ben & Jerry’s and Spotify and running online campaigns.
In advance of National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 20, HeadCount has been working to expand its partnerships, with Monumental Sports serving as the next big professional athletics deal, following an event accompanying last winter’s NHL all-star game in Las Vegas.
“Monumental wanted to start us as big as they could, which was not with one team but with three,” Bell said.
The partnership began in July, with HeadCount setting up voter registration tables at the Mystics’ final games of the WNBA season, played at Capital One and the Entertainment & Sports Arena in D.C. With the Mystics now eliminated from postseason play, the sports segment of the partnership will resume this fall when the NHL’s Capitals and NBA’s Wizards begin preseason games and then continue through their entire 2022-23 seasons.
“We see a lot of value in the season partnerships,” Bell said, explaining that regularly participating in events has a far bigger impact than a single occurrence. “Like with artists – we don’t ask to do a single concert, we want to do the whole tour.”
HeadCount will also run tables during every Capital One Arena concert leading up to Election Day (Nov. 8). Scheduled artists include Kid Cudi, Mary J. Blog, Lizzo, Post Malone, The Killers and Smashing Pumpkins and Iron Maiden.
“We have guaranteed staffing at every event, with local volunteers supporting that,” Bell said, explaining that standard staffing includes four to six people but those numbers can be scaled up.
When staffers engage with event attendees, their first question is always whether they are registered to vote. If not, the staffers will help people fill out the paperwork. For those who have registered, staffers will move to a secondary set of actions that include checking registration status, encouraging people to register as volunteers or signing up for absentee ballots.
At least one Grammy-winning global star is helping with voter registration efforts despite not even performing in the United States in the run-up to Election Day.
In July, HeadCount and Billie Eilish announced a contest in which those who register to vote or check their registration status could win a trip to see Eilish perform in Australia and New Zealand in September. In addition to being stops on her world tour, those two nations have much higher voter participation rates than the United States.
“I’m working with HeadCount to encourage everyone to show up at the polls and use their voice during these midterm elections,” Eilish said. With what is going on in our country, we need to get out to the polls and vote for what we believe in. Not showing up is not an option.”
HeadCount isn’t the only organization leading voter engagement efforts. More Than a Vote, the group founded by NBA star LeBron James, has worked with sports teams and arenas to turn those facilities into voting centers. It has also provided funding for election workers in majority-Black districts.
Other artists and celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, used social media to encourage their fans to vote in 2020.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.