Taylor Swift’s post about Harris draws over 400,000 visitors on Vote.gov

Taylor Swift, the world’s most famous childless cat lady, has sparked a surge in traffic on the U.S. government information website Vote.gov after she endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

On Tuesday, September 10, Swift wrote in an Instagram post that she would be voting for Harris in the November US presidential election, an endorsement that came shortly after the debate between Harris and Donald Trump concluded. “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for rights and causes that I believe need a warrior to stand up for. I think she’s a confident, talented leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote.

Swift, who now has over 284 million Instagram followers, shared a link to the Vote.gov website on her Instagram Story (which disappears after 24 hours).

In the 24 hours after Swift posted Tuesday evening, the Vote.gov website received 405,999 visits that were directed directly from the singer’s Instagram account, said a spokesman for the General Services Administration, which runs the site. Diversity. (GSA was able to count visitors using a custom URL created and provided by Swift.) That’s more than 10 times the traffic generated in the last week: The site had about 30,000 daily visitors from Sept. 3 to 9. The traffic surge from Swift also accounted for more than half of all visitors to Vote.gov between Sept. 10 and 11 (726,523 total visitors).

It is not known how many visitors who were encouraged by Swift’s post later registered to vote, but according to the GSA, there were more than 27,000 new registrations through Vote.gov as of September 11 (as well as more than 80,000 people who verified their registration status). Vote.gov does not allow people to register to vote; instead, the site directs U.S. residents to their state elections websites for information about voting in individual states, and they must register directly with their state.

At the MTV VMAs on Wednesday night — where Swift won seven awards, giving her a record-breaking 30 — she spoke on stage and repeated her call for Americans to vote. “If you’re 18, register to vote,” she told the VMA audience. “This is an important election.”

GSA says Vote.gov is “the trusted source of accurate, official U.S. government voting information for the American public. Our mission is to make it easy for all eligible voters to understand how to register and vote.”

Swift, in her endorsement of Harris, said she recently learned “that an AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted on his site. That really sparked my concerns about AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It led me to the realization that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The easiest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”

Swift’s Instagram post endorsing Harris and her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, has more than 10 million likes as of Thursday. The pop star captioned the post, “Childless Cat Lady,” referencing comments by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who said in 2022 that the Democratic Party is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their lives and the choices they’ve made.”