“More than half of voters in a new survey say they support pop star Taylor Swift’s get-out-the-vote effort to push her fans to vote in this year’s election, but the number is down 15 points from February following a conspiracy theory surrounding the idea of a rigged Super Bowl. The newly released Monmouth University poll found 53 percent of voters approve of Swift’s push to get her fans to vote, with 35 percent saying they disapprove. Twelve percent said they didn’t know,” wrote The Hill on Friday in the lede to a story headlined “Support for Taylor Swift get-out-the-vote efforts falls after Super Bowl conspiracy theory,” categorized under the site’s “In The Know” section.
They way they wrote it you would actually know less than before if you did read it. They didn’t even fucking link the poll result – probably a conscious decision on their part. The questions on Swift came separately and a day after Monmouth’s main national poll which, was not really a binary head-to-head but asked “How likely are you to vote for…” in two separate questions on convicted felon former President Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, to which Harris “led” 49 to 44 percent when “Definitely” and “Probably” from each were combined. We skipped it because, as some polling geeks we follow on Twitter and trust for analysis had pointed out, as far as we know there’s nothing stopping a respondent from saying they’ll “probably” or “definitely” vote for both Trump and Harris.
Aside from a passing mention buried in a lengthy “The Memo” rundown on Friday morning, The Hill skipped it too. But they still needed to find some kind of “win” elsewhere in Monmouth’s polling.
The Hill put in the effort to create their own chart where you can tab back and forth between Monmouth’s February finding and the September one, showing the “clear drop.” Which is a little strange considering Monmouth already put one in their poll and they could’ve just copied the image:
Interesting. Also interesting is that it takes until the eighth paragraph for The Hill to mention the partisan breakdown, explaining that the poll’s release says “68 percent of voters backed Swift’s turn-out-the-vote efforts in February. While support for Swift’s political engagement remains ‘astronomically high’ among Democrats, Monmouth noted, it has dropped from 41 percent to 20 percent among Republicans and 73 percent to 52 percent among independents.”
The actual affirmative disapproval is in the crosstabs, showing that 66 percent of Republican respondents and 35 percent of Indie respondents were against, with the remainder saying they don’t know. Funny enough that’s a similar-ish number to the 29 percent of indies in the same sample who said they’re definitely voting for Trump… So really what this poll (likely) found was MAGA voters who didn’t give a shit in February when it was a hypothetical that Taylor Swift might endorse Joe Biden decided that they didn’t like her actually endorsing Kamala Harris on a horrific debate night.
Caitlin Clark likes Taylor Swift's endorsement of Harris for president https://t.co/1ThQXhZgvF
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 11, 2024
It was like 9/11 all over again for Fox News when a white, heterosexual standout in a league dominated by Black lesbians clicked “like” on Swift’s Instagram post so yeah it shouldn’t be especially surprising that their approval of the 21st century’s Elvis getting into politics went down right as Trump screamed “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” after months of thirsting for her approval.
Yet rather than a statistical quantification of convulsing, epileptic-seizure-level shrieking freakout we’ve so immensely enjoyed watching play out over the last 10 days, The Hill frames the poll finding as if it were some sort of broad public rejection of Swift getting “involved in politics.”
Breaking: Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris and signs her endorsement “Childless Cat Lady.”
Unsurprising. But if Taylor really wants to protect her cats from Haitian migrants, she should reconsider!#ProtectTaylorsCats
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 11, 2024
Probably because they’re just simply cunts and wish they could lash out the same way Charlie Kirk and the rest of his ilk did. Instead The Hill’s staff have to “act professional” and write around the otherwise blatantly obvious takeaway from the polling with this bullshit, to which they also mentioned “Despite Swift’s Democratic endorsement, 81 percent in an ABC News/Ipsos poll earlier this week said her support for Harris will not influence how they vote, with only 6 percent of respondents saying they are more likely to vote for Harris after Swift’s nod. Thirteen percent said it makes them less likely to back the Democratic ticket,” purposely ignoring that ABC themselves had wrote “Those responding negatively are overwhelmingly Trump supporters, according to the poll.”
Yes, you all know The Hill is shit, you all know how much we hate them, and yes, we’re clowning ourselves a little here, especially with the hyper-focus on Messianic Swift-ism as manifested in a lame poll. It’s just this convergence and the way The Hill copes – with the subtlety necessary to maintain their completely illegitimate mainstream reputation – demands a takedown on this level.
We let it slide earlier this year, at the height of the Great Super Bowl/Swift “psyop” shitshow, when they wrote “Swift has yet to state her support for any candidate in the 2024 cycle, though given the 2020 endorsement, a nod to likely GOP nominee former President Trump seems unlikely. After her endorsement in 2020, Biden tweeted his thanks for what he referred to as Swift ‘speaking out at this crucial moment in our nation’s history.’ Biden is considerably less popular now, and there could be real questions about whether Swift would want to even get drawn into this year’s race,” which was about as quiet and understated as they could get as far as simply willing it not to happen.
And yet they got their wish. Taylor Swift did not endorse Joe Biden. Big win for The Hill, lol.