Taylor-made booster for Biden as 2024 presidential election nears?

Pop star’s influence may mobilise more people, get them to register to vote

WASHINGTON As United States President Joe Biden’s poll numbers flag ahead of the election in 2024, it might seem obvious for him to look to billionaire pop star Taylor Swift, who endorsed him in 2020, and whose every move is endlessly catalogued by the media.

It is a fact his campaign knows all too well.

“Please do not tell us that we need a Taylor Swift strategy. We are tracking,” quipped a recent communications job advertisement for Mr Biden’s re-election campaign.

And yet, in the highly polarised American political and media landscape, everything the superstar singer does or does not do is likely to invite a simultaneous deluge of either praise or firestorm of criticism.

Swift, recently named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, is viewed favourably by 70 per cent of Americans the sort of numbers that any president would kill for.

Perhaps none more than Mr Biden, whose approval ratings recently dipped to 39 per cent the lowest of any recent US leader at this point in their presidency, according to polling firm Gallup, and also the fifth time his ratings fell below 40 per cent in 2023 alone.

Swift’s 2020 endorsement of Mr Biden, and her knack for using non-partisan campaigns to register her Swiftie superfans to vote, does not mean that politics comes without scrutiny for the superstar.