Once Taylor Swift dropped her long-anticipated endorsement of Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, minutes after Harris’s finale in her debate against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, those dominoes fell, just like she promised in “Mastermind.”
Harris’s first post-debate stop was her official watch party at Philadelphia’s Cherry Street Pier, where she walked onstage to her usual blaring hype-up music, Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” according to the press pooler. That recorded 11:10 walk-on time would have been just about 5-ish minutes after Swift’s social media post went live, while people were mostly texting “Taylor endorsed!!” and “is this real?”
“Hard work is good work, and we will win,” Harris told her supporters from the stage. In video, a member of the audience can be heard screaming “Taylor Swift endorsed!” sounding like, as one social media user noted, “the modern Paul Revere.”
By the time Harris walked offstage at 11:28 p.m., the news had sunk in and the playlist had been updated. Harris, riding the excitement of her night, exited the stage to Swift’s “The Man,” and the lyrical lament, “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.”
Harris’s rapid response team, too, lived up to their name, quickly posting an edit touting Swift’s endorsement and photos of Harris, set to Swift’s jock-jam-esque track “Ready for It.”
Walz put his hand to his heart, moved, when Maddow read out Swift’s pledge to vote for the ticket in 2024, and smiled through her reading of the caption, mouthing, “Wow, wow!” when she finished, then saying, “All those things I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift. I say that also as a cat owner, a fellow cat owner.” He also called out “Swifties” by name, in case you heard that seismic clatter of friendship bracelet beads clattering to the ground, and said, “That’s the type of courage we need in America, to stand up.”
Speaking of friendship bracelets, Harris’s merch team quickly put a set of them up for pre-order on her site, with beads spelling out “Harris Walz” and—a nice little touch—the adjustor bead bearing a tiny “24.” This feels like yet another sign that Team Harris didn’t actually know this endorsement was coming, especially not specifically on Tuesday, but really, really hoped it would, and was ready to hit “go” when the time came. (By lunchtime Wednesday, the bracelet preorder was sold out.) And, for what it’s worth, Swifties for Kamala political director April Glick Pulito tweeted “guys i promise we didn’t know we really didn’t know” in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
By breakfast time, Swift’s Instagram post, featuring a shot from her TIME Person of the Year shoot of her cuddling up to the one and only Benjamin Button (the cat, not Brad Pitt in prosthetics), had racked up more than 8.7 million likes and counting. Conservatives had also had time to have their say, including Elon Musk tweeting an aggressively creepy “offer” to “give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” which, ew, and Trump calling in to Fox & Friends Wednesday to basically paraphrase the bridge from “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and saying he always liked Brittany Mahomes better than Taylor anyway, so there. He doesn’t even want her endorsement, ok? Even though he has said multiple times in the past that he did, and even used AI-generated images to pretend that she endorsed him, he doesn’t. Nyah nyah, etc and so forth.
“Well, I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said when asked about Swift having her say. “She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan. It was only a matter of time. You couldn’t possibly endorse Biden. But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace. But I like Brittany. Brittany is great. She’s the one I like much better than Taylor Swift. Wife of the great quarterback. I think she’s terrific.”
The Swifties for Kamala political organizing group, which is not officially affiliated with Swift and has said they did not feel they needed to wait for an official endorsement from Swift to get moving, predicted in a press release that “that impact is only going to grow thanks to Taylor’s endorsement.” Co-founder and executive director Irene Kim said, “We knew she would speak when the time was right and are so excited to keep up the fight.”
The group said it has more than 3,500 active volunteers, and has raised more than $158,000 for Harris’s campaign. The group’s kickoff call featured speakers such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, with music icon Carole King performing an impromptu snippet of Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
Baby, let the games begin, indeed.
