In less than a week, Swifties have turned their community into an online campaign headquarters for Vice President Kamala Harris, and the campaign wants to join the effort.
After President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection last week, Emerald Medrano, 22, was turned on by the news. As she watched pundits discuss the Democratic nomination, she felt she had to do it. somethingHe had never been involved in politics, but he had a popular Swift fan account. He wasn’t sure what to do. He tweeted“I feel like we Americans should be organizing en masse and helping campaign for Kamala Harris and spreading the word about how horrendous Project 2025 would be to help turn people out to vote.”
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Medrano received hundreds of responses and direct messages from other Swifties offering their support, largely motivated by civil rights, trans rights, and reproductive health. Some had experience in politics. Others had massive Swift fan accounts or worked in social media professionally. The fandom served as a social lubricant for politically curious Swifties to get involved and leverage the skills they learned in the community for electoral purposes.
“The shared interest and knowledge of fandom is definitely a great way to bridge that connection to civic engagement and political activism,” Madeline Miner, 22, social media coordinator for Swifties for Kamala, tells WIRED.
Since Medrano’s tweet, Swifties for Kamala has grown to over 300 members, and thousands more have requested to join their Discord server. The group has grown so quickly that it has already gone through three “restructurings.” Now, it has over 80,000 followers on TikTok, 48,000 on X, 16,000 on Instagram, and a Substack titled “Paint the town blue” in reference to a Swift song. (Other pro-Harris Swiftie accounts have sprung up over the past week, but Swifties for Kamala is the largest.)
The group has four teams: communications, finance, outreach and social media. In the case of social media, teams are assigned to platforms, each with its own leader. Rohan Reagan, 21, who already ran A successful Swiftie account On Instagram, she leads the group’s efforts in that regard. For years, Reagan posted edits of herself on Swift; now she’s posting edits of Harris.
“The reels, the posts, all of that stuff I create myself or I commission someone else to do,” Reagan said. “We have a post online on the site right now that someone did on their own and created all the research infographics on their own. So they brought it to me. I fixed it up a little bit and then posted it.”
Before Reagan or any other social media managers could create the edits, 23-year-old social media coordinator Leigh Bauer began developing the account’s brand and voice. Bauer was inspired by the fandom, specifically Swift’s official fan account. @taylornation13in x.
“They have a very distinctive voice that shares news and updates and tells us when there’s new stuff and when albums are coming out and so on. But they’re also really, really good at interacting with fans online,” Bauer said. “And so they want to continue to be another familiar voice that fans understand… but also a respectable voice.”