The conventional wisdom is that celebrity endorsements don’t matter. Bruce Springsteen, denim boss-god that he is, cannot move votes with an endorsement. Neither can George Clooney. And so, we should assume, even Taylor Swift’s Tuesday night endorsement of Kamala Harris won’t do much in November.
But Taylor Swift has an audience, or maybe an army, of (mostly) young women following her. That’s why right-wing pundits lost their collective minds over a potential Swift endorsement last year, branding it a Pentagon psyop. And her endorsement was aimed at those women. She says she’s worried about AI deepfakes. She reminds first-time voters to vote and to vote early. She posts a link to register. Last time she posted that link, 35,000 people registered to vote.
And maybe her endorsement doesn’t matter, because nobody actually thought—despite the AI deepfake that Donald Trump posted—that Taylor Swift was going to endorse Trump. But what about Travis Kelce?
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According to one anonymous “insider,” a Harris endorsement from Kelce could be coming “very soon,” adding, “After Taylor revealed her endorsement for Kamala, Travis knew what he had to do. He understood the assignment.”
Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, is number three on the Spotify sports podcast charts. People are listening to him, and the crowd that’s listening to him are generally what we call “low-information voters” They’re getting more of their news from Barstool and Pat McAffee than Politico. They are (primarily) young men. On Twitter, the New Heights fanbase once voted to call themselves “the Jabronis,” which is obviously a more apt pejorative than “low-information voters.”
I hate the term “low-information voters.” These are just normal, (mostly) sane guys who don’t feel like tuning into the dumpster-fire-in-a-flood that is the American political ecosystem. But more, and more, these guys are becoming “shitty-information voters.” They’re watching Jordan Peterson cosplay as a fun guy on Kill Tony; or they’re hearing Aaron Rodgers bashing the covid vaccine on Pat McAffee’s show and these (mostly) sane guys are nodding along. In the process, they are becoming a little less sane.
They’re starting to think the modern world is rigged against them, which is the main argument of figures like Jordan Peterson or Donald Trump. What has preserved the sanity of the jabronis is that they have mostly ignored the political sphere. But via the culture war, the political sphere is sneaking up on them. And, for the record, they’d rather it not. The number one rule on the New Heights subreddit (which has over 46,000 users) is “no political posts.”
I don’t know if a Travis Kelce endorsement would turn into many votes. Probably it won’t. We have this fantasy about celebrity endorsements. As one Swifty critic in the New York Times recently bemoaned, we carry on our impossible hope that celebrities, “through their sheer persuasive charisma, will save us from the hard work of politics itself.”
But what if we make the hard work fun? What if we made it look a little less like work? Again, I’m not arguing that Kelce can swing this thing. He can’t. But a Kelce endorsement stands alone in a media ecosystem that treats Trump as an American everyman selling a rational worldview. And a Kelce endorsement would now sit side-by-side with a Taylor Swift endorsement. These two are America’s it-couple at the moment. And—because it’s football season—they’re going to remain America’s it-couple through the election.
What if the endorsement is turned into action? What if, in the week before the polls close, Taylor Swift did a mini Eras tour in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia—the states that will decide the 2024 presidential election. Call it Era-body go to the polls.
Let’s get Taylor and Travis on that stage together. Let’s make them royalty, like Harry and Meghan—except likable. Have them sing a duet. Put Travis Kelce in a blue morning coat and top hat. Have him swing in on a campaign sign. To hell with the people who grouch, this is politics, this is about the issues. Did you see that debate? Trump short-circuited and bellowed that immigrants are eating pet cats in Ohio.
The young men who are already fully sold on the right-wing mindset don’t like Travis Kelce, who has been an advocate (albeit a paid one) for vaccines. And Kelce’s fans might not want him to get into politics. But too bad, football has been political since Colin Kaepernick. Last year, Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker sat through a college graduation just so he could air his political opinions, declaring that there’s a “war amongst families, [a] war on truths.”
I’ve got a family myself and I haven’t met a single person who is trying to defeat us. Certainly, there’s no war going on. But it must be exhausting to exist in that world. To see transgender aliens around every corner. To believe that immigrants are eating cats and go around thinking—despite Harris’ proposed child tax credit—that families are under attack. Travis Kelce could be the guy to say hey, all this sounds a little nuts, let’s aim for sanity.
"NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 08: Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs attend the Men's Singles Final match between Taylor Fritz of the United States and Jannik Sinner of Italy on Day Fourteen of the 2024 US Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on September 08, 2024 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)"
Jamie SquireTaylor Swift’s endorsement was a push-back against the right-wing worldview that modern women are fundamentally unhappy because women (in a post-Dobbs world) exist only to bear children. That’s why Swift signed her endorsement “childless cat lady.” And a Kelce endorsement would do the same thing. It says, look, young man, nobody is out to get you. This is America and you make your way in it. So what if women can be more than mothers now? Maybe that’s a good thing.
The problem of course, is how to keep all of this from getting annoying. Because celebrities telling you what to think is annoying. Do you remember the pandemic, when we were holed up in our apartments and the celebrities live-streamed themselves singing “Imagine?” That’s precisely the vibe we are not going for.
I’m not proposing Travis Kelce as a campaign surrogate. He doesn’t need to be talking policy (or even vibes) with Rachel Maddow. But he can come out and shoot down all these batshit ideas about the decline of manhood. And yeah, he could do a mini-tour alongside Taylor Swift. Maybe just, you know, don’t wear that stupid bucket hat when he does it. Because we’re arguing for healthy, rational manhood here, you can’t do that if you’re dressed like a Backstreet Boys backup dancer.
