A poll released Wednesday found that 18% of Americans believe Taylor Swift is part of a covert government effort to support President Joe Biden’s reelection in 2024.
According to a Monmouth University survey conducted Feb. 8-12 and released Wednesday, 83% of those who believe in the Swift conspiracy say they’re likely to support former President Donald Trump in the fall. And nearly three-quarters (73%) of the conspiracy believers also believe the outcome of the 2020 election was fraudulent.
In its press release on the poll, Monmouth noted that 42% of the individuals who said they believed the conspiracy exists had not heard about it before being contacted for the survey, highlighting how pervasive conspiratorial beliefs have become on the right.
“Even many who hadn’t heard about it before we polled them accept the idea as credible. Welcome to the 2024 election,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth University’s Polling Institute.
The conspiracy has been heavily spotlit in the lead-up to, and the aftermath of, the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl win. Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays tight end for the Chiefs.
Some conservatives, including ex-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, speculated the game would be rigged to bolster a potential “presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple.”
But Ramaswamy is far from the only person teasing Taylor Swift election conspiracies.
Fox News ran a chyron questioning if Swift was a “Pentagon asset” in January while discussing her encouraging fans to register to vote. And after the Chiefs’ win, a trolling social media post by Biden mocking the pysop conspiracy revealed others who’d bought into the theory.
Swift—who endorsed Biden in 2020—has become a frequent target of conservatives due to her political stances, as has Kelce for his promotion of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
But Swift has yet to weigh in on the 2024 presidential race and the Pentagon has pushed back on the conspiracy as well.
“As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said, referencing multiple Swift hits in a statement to Politico. “But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns.”
Though nearly one in five Americans believe there’s a conspiracy at play, the poll wasn’t all bad news for Swift.
It also found that 39% of adults have a favorable impression of her while only 13% hold an unfavorable view of the singer. And the vast majority—68%—approve of Swift encouraging fans to vote in the upcoming election, though Republicans are less supportive (42%) than Democrats (88%) in that regard.
