This is a Taylor Swift Election: Watch Tuesday’s Results

By Colleen O’Connor

If you haven’t seen  the poll that found Biden trailing Trump in five out of six battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania by margins of 3 to 10 percentage points among registered voters, or read Obama Chief strategist, David Axelrod’s,  comments suggesting Biden drop out of 2024 presidential race, then you need to go see the Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie to cheer up.

The poll serves as a major blow to Biden’s campaign after the incumbent carried all six states in 2020 when up against Trump, The New York Times reported.

Today voters are deciding 10 hugely important races.  Abortion tops the list as a driving force of turnout predictions and results.  State legislative contests, as in Virginia, will determine If Governor Glenn Youngkin, prevails and jumps into the Republican Presidential race.

A replay of Trump v. Biden that few want to experience.

Add all the horrific headlines of wars, mass shootings, domestic and international terrorism, environmental chaos, global economic uncertainty, illegal immigration, mental illness, becoming a retreat into despair that becomes epidemic.

Enter Taylor Swift.  A phenom.  A billionaire.  A force of talent, timing, and energy that is remarkable.  See Wikipedia for all the awards, her history and wealth.

Better still, go see the movie.  Swift sold out all her national performances (with huge ticket prices and lots of scalping), but, wanted those not in her live venues to share her talent at a modest price.  Hence, she made a move of the in-person tour, to be shown at movie theaters across the country.

As an historian, I wanted to comprehend what I knew nothing about.  Taylor Swift.  Off to her movie (mostly sold out for weeks), I go and was stunned by her talent, her precision timing, her costumes (modest for the genre) the staging and inclusive talent of her backup singers, dancers and musicians provided a more stunning show that any Super Bowl halftime production.  Or Olympic extravaganza.

Her energy, her sincerity, and ability to connect with her audience (without unnecessary artifice) makes her a marvel.

So much so, this spring, UC Berkeley will join Stanford, New York University and the University of Texas at Austin in a small but growing club of world-class universities that have offered courses on Taylor Swift.

“The course, called “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” is offered through its Haas School of Business and will last 13 weeks. The course covers topics ranging from Swift’s use of literary devices (weeks five and six) to “Swiftonomics” (week seven) to Swift’s strategic use of artistic personas (weeks eight and nine, in a unit titled “victor/victim complex”).”

Swift has leveraged her success and fame into the political arena as well; directing the young “to get out and vote” in the 2016 Presidential election.  And done it again, today.

Taylor Swift has an Election Day message as Americans across the country head to the polls: “Voters gonna vote!”

The “Cruel Summer” singer urged her fans to make time for the ballot box Tuesday in an Instagram Stories post for her 275 million followers.

Watch the film, enjoy the energy, even if unable to decipher the words, and one finds a young woman singing of “letdowns” and “hurts” in a more powerful way than the older Trump.

Indeed, I would suggest she is upstaging the former President, among the young, the educated, the once wounded overcoming it all to push ahead and turn the wounds into blazing release.  The cheers and affection serve as an antidote to what ails us.

If only we could bottle it.  Watch tonight’s returns.  Study the demographics.

I have seen the future of American politics.  And it is Taylor Swift.