At 34 years old, Taylor Swift is the most spectacularly successful entrepreneur of her generation. By the end of 2023, her still-ongoing Eras Tour had grossed a stunning $1.04 billion, according to Pollstar, selling 4.35 million tickets across 60 tour dates. Those concerts made Swift a billionaire but also brought in revenue for restaurants, stores and hotels and generally did more for America’s downtowns, including Chicago’s, than any other cultural event driven by a single, much-loved person.
She’s in love with a football player named Travis Kelce, or so it surely appears, and her mere attendance at his games has juiced the NFL’s TV audiences far more than any half-time performer or individual player. By many accounts, she has engaged in an innovative kind of personal profit-sharing with her own employees, paying out big bonuses to those who drive her sets around and others who helped her achieve this stunning level of success. That generosity in turn put pressure on other big pop stars to do the same last year, raising blue-collar compensation in the entertainment business across the board and tying it to success.
Add in Swift’s singular dedication to customer service, which in her case means taking personal care of her fanbase above all else, and her Herculean efforts to control her own inventory, which in her case means owning her recordings, and you have what surely will be a case study developed by the Harvard Business School, if they have not done so already.
We’re far from done. Swift’s music speaks to red-state and blue-state America, which you can tell from her tour routing (everywhere). She has determinedly worked across generations, musical genres (pop, rock, country), genders, ethnicities, races, whatever — arguably with more equal-handed efficacy than any artist since that living legend called Dolly Parton.
And ever mindful of her powerful influence on young people, especially girls, Swift has done all of this free of scandal and sans corruption, crassness or craziness. She’s even stayed closed to her loving mom and dad. To a lot of parents of tween and teenage girls, buffeted by their offsprings’ interest in less wholesome individuals, she is both a delight and a relief.
Sure, Swift is human and surely has flaws like the rest of us. But we are old enough to remember when Republicans would have praised such a person to the hilt, recognizing how well this professional trajectory matches their view of how this country should proceed. Older folks might even have willingly learned a thing or two from her admirable commitment to human rights, equality under the law and individual freedoms without interference.
But, wait! Swift seems to be a Democrat.
She might even endorse Joe Biden in the fall, Democrats have claimed to sympathetic reporters with an eye on their metrics, a possibility that has Democratic operatives salivating. The source herself so far has demurred beyond encouraging her fans to register to vote, an all-American thing to do.
So what if she does choose to stand next to Biden? It’s hardly a foregone conclusion. We’re also old enough to remember when Republicans would have acknowledged that was her choice to make and still been impressed, even as they made their own case that a woman of her business acumen and dedication to her family and friends naturally belongs with them.
Those days are gone. Instead, we now have the MAGA crowd bad-mouthing Swift, which is about as politically astute an action for a party struggling to appeal to women as finding yourself the target of multiple indictments before an election. If the likes of Sean Hannity drive Swift, and thus Swifties, into the realm of explicit endorsements, robocalls (“Hi, this is Taylor for Joe Biden”) and stump speeches due to their own juvenile obnoxiousness, they hardly will have served their own ends. Heck, she might well take a good chunk of the NFL crowd with her, especially the good people of Missouri and Kansas, red states the both. It’s as asinine as it is un-American.
So we were glad to see Nikki Haley and Liz Cheney remove themselves from this rapidly metastasizing narrative.
Of course, when someone gets this famous, especially in our clickbait world, people can’t resist using them as a vessel for their own agendas and ends. Even The New York Times ran into this trap, speculating in a recent invasive Opinion piece about Swift’s covert signaling of sexuality, as if she were not a living person capable of speaking for herself. Team Swift was understandably unimpressed, complaining of “a Taylor-shaped hole in people’s ethics.” But that was mild and harmless compared with what is happening now.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a loquacious politician who might one day have something useful to contribute to American democracy if he can free himself from his juvenile addiction to the propagation of absurd conspiracy theories, even speculated that the NFL is rigging football games to come up with a boffo Super Bowl ending next weekend and featuring Taylor and Travis smooching in center field, with a trophy, engineered for two, lofted high.
He might have asked the San Francisco 49ers if they had gotten that particular memo.
We suspect not. Whatever their politics, they’ll be looking to run right over that particular fairy tale.