Trump Versus Taylor

Politicians tussling with celebrities is usually seen as degrading to the politician. We want our singers, actors, and athletes to be both skilled and a little (or a lot) outrageous while our political leaders should be serious of purpose. It is widely accepted that Dan Quayle’s fight with Candice Bergen (or rather, with her television character Murphy Brown), the classic of the genre, injured the vice president and his party in the 1992 elections. The latest verbal clash between Donald Trump and Taylor Swift could thus be expected to end just as badly, especially as Trump decided to take on not just a fictional character but the most famous American singer and perhaps the most popular woman in the entire world. And he did it in the least felicitous manner possible. On September 15, the former president of the United States took to his own social media site Truth Social to disgorge one simple sentence: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

What did little ol’ Taylor do to deserve such ire? On September 10, she took to Instagram to formally and publicly endorse Kamala Harris for president, taking her own petty swipe at the Republican ticket by signing her endorsement “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” While Trump and Swift are both rich enough to afford to shake off public disapproval of their politics, only one is currently running in the world’s biggest and most expensive popularity contest. Pundits quickly grabbed their popcorn, anxiously waiting for the backlash against Trump to begin.

Yet this was hardly the first time Trump had publicly criticized Swift, nor the first time Swift had provoked Trump. The two have been dancing this dysfunctional tango since 2018. But many in the media thought that maybe this time, just maybe, it was the end game for America’s once and future autocrat.

It wasn’t.

In fact, it turns out Taylor Swift isn’t much more popular than Donald Trump. Right after Swift’s endorsement and through Trump’s Truth Social outburst, several polling organizations asked Americans their views not only of Trump, Harris, and the election, but of Taylor Swift as well. A New York Times/Siena College poll showed Swift and Trump have a favorability gap among likely voters of 14 points, with Swift at +10 favorability and Trump at –4. This gap is primarily the result of high numbers of people who really hate Trump, however. While 44 percent of voters have a favorable view of Swift, 47 percent have a favorable view of Trump. Unlike the New York Times/Siena poll, an NBC News poll gave voters a “neutral” response option and found an even larger gap between respondents with a positive view of Trump (40 percent) versus of Swift (33 percent).

While Trump might very well need to calm down, his fan base overlaps little with Taylor Swift’s. In the Times poll from mid-September, Swift had the highest favorability ratings from voters least likely to support Trump: college graduates (+33); 2020 Biden voters (+57); and Democrats (+59). Young women are the Swiftie shock troops, and according to the post-imbroglio Harvard Youth Poll, 70 percent of likely female voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine favor Harris, a definitive blow-out.

Yet age doesn’t seem to be the most important reason young women oppose Trump. Instead it is marital status. It is well-known that Trump wins married women but loses all other women. There is no real difference in partisan identity (with all its implications for voting behavior) between never-married women, cohabiting women, and divorced women. What one might see as youth is more about singleness. Add in childlessness (which strongly overlaps with singleness) and you have a significant voting bloc strongly aligned with the contemporary Democratic Party holding libertarian attitudes toward sexual behavior, sexuality, gender identity, reproductive technology, and abortion. Tim Walz turned “Minnesota nice” into “mind your own damn business” for a reason. 

Trump has in turn come to rely increasingly on the support of men. In 2016, the last time a woman fronted the Democratic ticket, the gender gap between the candidates was 13 points. Polling suggests the 2024 gender gap is just as large. In that men vote at notably lower rates than women do, Trump will have to draw more men than Harris will draw women. That is Trump’s heaviest lift of this election. His base from which to work is married men. In 2016 he won this group by 30 points. That crushing difference was reduced to just 10 points when Joe Biden was on the ballot in 2020.  Trump also needs a big turnout from white men. In 2016 he won this group by 30 points but the margin shrunk to 17 in 2020.

Trump has expanded the demographic pool of male voters he can draw on. In 2016 Trump won 28 percent of Hispanic men. In 2020 he won 40 percent of them. A mid-September NBC News/Telemundo poll of only Hispanic voters showed Trump with 47 percent of the male Hispanic vote. That constitutes a tie with Harris. Trump enjoys a similar if less dramatic improvement among black men. In 2016 he won 14 percent of the black male vote, and 12 percent in 2020. An August poll commissioned by the NAACP, however, showed a shocking 25 percent of black male voters under age fifty supporting Trump. This is not an outlier result. National polls throughout the early fall consistently show Trump with around 15 percent of the overall black vote, double what he won in 2020. The strong majority of that increase is clearly coming from men.

Is this indicative of a demographic realignment of American politics away from race and ethnicity? Republicans certainly hope and believe so. But perhaps this is simply a peculiar effect of the “toxic masculine” Donald Trump facing a female opponent. As race and ethnicity recede in importance, gender and marital status rush in to take their place. With a different set of candidates, we may see a reversal of this realignment. But I don’t think so.

As marriage in the United States becomes both later (median age at first marriage for men is now over thirty and nearly twenty-nine for women) and rarer (the percentage of never-married forty-year-olds in America has risen from 6 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2020), the social separation of the sexes inevitably fosters their cultural and political separation. The sociological literature has a term, “gender linked fate,” that captures this phenomenon. Research finds that, compared to unmarried women, married women tend to hold more conservative views on matters relating to gender and feel they share less in common with women as a group. This is especially true for white women. Instead of embracing gender solidarity, married women instead share interests with husbands and children and are, quite simply, less progressive on the whole slate of feminist issues. Relating to the current election, the most significant of these is clearly abortion. Married women support abortion-on-demand less and have fewer abortions. Much fewer. In 2021, around 87 percent of all abortions in the United States were procured by unmarried women, and they had an abortion rate (number of abortions per live births) nearly ten times larger than married women.

The general agreement over family policy between JD Vance and Tim Walz in the vice-presidential debate was thus a strange meeting point for the parties in light of their dramatically different voting bases. In the 1970s, the American partisan and ideological divide was symbolized as a clash between the married middle-class father and his rebellious son. Today that symbol is more evocative as a clash between that same father and his progressive daughter. In the 1970s, conservatives could be consoled by the likelihood that the son would one day marry and have children of his own, and thus come to better understand his conservative father by becoming one himself. But daughters will never become fathers, and marriage and family are ever-receding as the presumptive future of young Americans. Demographer Lyman Stone observes that already 15 percent of American women have never married by the age of fifty with that number sure to rise in the coming years. He also projects that 25 percent of women beginning with cohorts born in the late 1980s, as in women currently in their mid-thirties, will spend their lives childless. The “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” voter “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body” is not only the Democratic Party’s present. It is its future. Are you ready for it?

Darel E. Paul is professor of political science at Williams College.

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Image by Paolo V, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.