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Could Taylor Swift be the biggest election influencer of them all?

Opinion

Taylor Swift
Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
David L. Nevins
By David L. NevinsFeb 01, 2024
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
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David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

There is a long history in the United States of presidential candidates receiving important celebrity endorsements that many argue have tipped the tide from one candidate to another.

As far back as 1920, when Warren Harding was endorsed by film stars including Lillian Russell, and 40 years later, when John F. Kennedy was endorsed by Rat Pack members Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, celebrity endorsements have been highly courted by presidential candidates.

More recently, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Sen. Barack Obama early in the 2008 race when he still lacked much of a national following; in 2020, Joe Biden received endorsements from stars such as Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence just to name a few.

Celebrity endorsements aren’t limited to Democratic candidates. Ronald Reagan in 1980 was endorsed by Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone and Dean Martin, and in 1968 sport stars Wilt Chamberlain and Joe Lewis threw their support behind Richard Nixon.

But today, in the age of social media where the influence and reach of celebrities is greater than ever, one superstar stands above the pack. All eyes are on Taylor Swift as we wonder whether she will endorse Biden over Donald Trump.

The youth vote is critical in the 2024 presidential election and many believe that, due to the age of the two likely nominees, young voters simply won’t show up on Election Day. But enthusiastic support from the 34-year-old pop star, who endorsed Biden in 2020, may get huge numbers of them to vote.

Of course the president desires her support, but even if Swift doesn’t endorse Biden, her influence can be felt if she simply asks her followers to get out and vote. Her power was proven in the last election when one Instagram post led to over 30,000 new voter registrations. Swift has a staggering 279 million Instagram followers.

We have seen her power as an influencer during football games as she cheered for her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. In early October, her attendance at a game and repeated shots of her cheering contributed to 27 million people tuning in – the most viewers since the previous Super Bowl. And 55.4 million people watched the game between the Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens on Jan. 28, making it the most watched AFC championship game in NFL history.

Already MAGA supporters are showing their concern as conspiracy theories abound suggesting the Kansas City Chiefs are headed to the Super Bowl as part of a psychological plot organized by Biden and the Democratic Party.

Whether pre-emptive attacks on Swift by Republicans will be amplified and whether Trump himself will dare to go after her are questions that could have a greater impact on the upcoming election than important policy debates such as abortion, immigration, and support for Israel and Ukraine.

And so is the world of politics in the United States.

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Discerning how to connect with people who hold political views in opposition to our own is one of the Gordian knots of our time. This seemingly insurmountable predicament, centered in the new film The Elephant in the Room, hits close to home for all of us in the broad mainline Protestant family. We often get labeled “progressive Christians” — but 57% of White non-evangelical Protestants report voting for Donald Trump. So this is something we can’t just ignore, no matter how uncomfortable it is.

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Photo illustration by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra

Iguanas on the Tombstones: A Poet's Metaphor for Colonialism​

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“It was quite a sight to witness these iguanas sunning themselves on a wall of that cemetery, or slithering from one tomb to the next, or squatting on the tomb of Albizu Campos, or staring up at the bust of José de Diego, with a total lack of comprehension, being iguanas,” Espada told palabra from his home in the western Massachusetts town of Shelburne Falls.

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Does One Battle After Another Speak to Latino Resistance?

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Does One Battle After Another Speak to Latino Resistance?

After decades of work, Angeleno director P.T. Anderson has scored his highest-grossing film with his recent One Battle After Another. Having opened on the weekend of September 26, the film follows the fanatical, even surrealistic, journey of washed-up revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who lives in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), some fifteen years after his militant group, French 75, went underground. When their nemesis Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces, Bob and Wila again find themselves running from the law. When Wila goes AWOL, her karate teacher, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), is enlisted to help Bob find his daughter. Although ambitious, edgy, and fun, the political message of the hit film is generally muddled. The immensely talented director did not make a film matching the Leftist rigor of, say, Battleship Potemkin. Nor can the film be grouped among a veritable cavalcade of fictional and non-fictional films produced during the last twenty years that deal with immigrant issues along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Sleep Dealer, El Norte, and Who is Dayani Cristal? are but a few of the stronger offerings of a genre of filmmaking that, for both good and bad, may constitute a true cinematic cottage industry.

Nevertheless, the film leans heavily into Latino culture in terms of themes, setting, and characters. Filmed largely in the U.S.’s Bordertown par excellence—El Paso, Texas—we meet the martial arts teacher Sergio, who describes his work helping migrants cross the border as a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” We learn that the fugitive revolutionary, Bob, is known by several aliases, including “The Gringo Coyote.” His savior, Sensei Sergio, explains to him outrightly that he’s “a bad hombre”—cheekily invoking the hurtful bon mots used by then-candidate Donald Trump in a 2016 debate with Hilary Clinton. The epithet is repeated later on in the film when Bob, under police surveillance in the hospital, is tipped off to an exit route by a member of the French 75 disguised as a nurse: “Are you diabetic? You’re a bad hombre, Bob. You know, if you’re a bad hombre, you make sure you take your insulin on a daily basis, right?” All this, plus the fact that the film’s denouement begins with a raid on a Mexican Restaurant in Northern California.

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