Taylor Swift has spent the last two years of the Trump presidency making up for the fact that she stayed completely silent about his candidacy in 2016. Swift’s transition to woke celeb has culminated in her soundtracking one of the final pro-Biden campaign ads of the 2020 race, which is set to her song “Only the Young.” (The singer officially endorsed Biden last month.)
The ad is sponsored by former Democratic presidential candidate Eric Swalwell’s political action committee Remedy PAC, and to be honest it’s a bit corny. I’m thinking of one part in particular, where Swift sings “and the big bad man and his big bad clan / their hands are stained with red” to a slideshow of photos of Trump, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Bill Barr.
But somehow Swift is the perfect celebrity avatar for the final days of the 2020 election, embodying the hope that the Biden-Harris campaign can turn out white, newly politically awakened women to give him a critical edge over Trump.
This quote from a 2019 Rolling Stone cover story which ran about a year after she began speaking out about her liberal politics, also seems to reflect the Democratic coalition-building the Biden campaign has relied on over the last several months: “We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat,” Swift told the magazine at the time. “We need to just be like, ‘You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.’”
You know what? Generally speaking, I don’t love that sort of sentiment. But in the spirit of election eve, I won’t say anything more on that!
And since it is election eve (did you know?), I thought I’d drop in Beyoncé’s endorsement, too:
Beyoncé famously waited to endorse Hillary Clinton until the day before the 2016 election, and in 2018, endorsed then-Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke just three days before the midterms. So it’s no surprise she gave the Biden-Harris ticket the same treatment.
- Kris Jenner defended Kendall’s 25th birthday bash, saying on an episode of on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, “All we can do is live our lives the best way we know how and be responsible and do the right thing.” Hmmm… [ET]
- Common had some very sweet things to say about girlfriend Tiffany Haddish in a Monday interview, the first time he’s spoken publicly about their relationship. “She’s a really incredible human being, and the more I get to know her, I just see how dynamic she is as a person,” he said. “How intelligent, how selfless she is, how she stands up in Hollywood for Black women. I’m learning. You know what I mean?” [Page Six]
- Pen15‘s Maya Erskine is pregnant and engaged! Double congrats to her and bf Michael Angarano. [People]