Taylor Swift, Trump and his Suburban Women problem

And the Biden campaign, believe it or not, is reaching out to Taylor Swift.

Far be it from me to advocate in defense of amateur Civil War historian Nikki Haley, but she is making a significant point with regards to Trump and suburban women. Or, more accurately, she is demonstrating that point through her continued, quixotic candidacy. While Ambassador Haley will never win the Republican nomination for President, she is providing data, in real time, of Trump’s inability to win over independents. In New Hampshire, for example, where President Biden did surprisingly well, 70 percent of her vote was from undeclared or independent voters — more likely to vote for him in the general election than for Trump. And — mirabile dictu — it is being funded by the Koch Brothers. Let’s hope Biden World is taking notes.

Trump has always — from 2015 onward — had to fight for the suburban women’s vote. On the first full day of his Presidency, for example, the historic women’s march on washington brought hundreds of thousands of women to the capital. White women helped elect Trump in 2016 and he needs them to regain the White House but he seems incapable — at age 77 — of controlling his sexist woman-hating. And as long as Nikki Haley remains in the race, Trump’s propensity to hurl cruel, sexist insults at her, the overwhelming underdog, will be seen — by women, especially — as lengthening the GOP gender gap. Trump’s dismissively calling his former UN Ambassador “Birdbrain” and, worse, the racially-charged “Nimrada” cannot possibly be construed as anything other than sleazy at best. It reminds me of Trump’s unforced error in attacking his loyal former Press Secretary. Beverly Hallberg, a conservative media coach, responded to a January 23 Truth Social rant against Kayleigh McEnany, on X:

Donald Trump would still keep all of his ardent supporters even if he never threw out personal insults again. He can talk tough, without having to go there. It's especially a bad look when he does it to women who worked for him. He would bring more independents and suburban women to his side if rose above this.

This is a good point. Hallberg noted on X she had tickets for Taylor Swift in Sweden in May. Many Americans — even Republicans — like her music. Swift spent her early years as a country music star and regular of the Grand Ole Opry stage. And she has been, before Trump, pretty apolitical. According to a March 2023 Morning consult poll, 53% of US adults consider themselves Taylor Swift fans and those fans are white and suburban (more on that in a bit). But Ms. Hallburg’s concerns as a Republican are interesting. Clearly she is MAGA friendly, but as a woman — and as a Taylor Swift fan — Trump is actually alienating some of his base. And the Biden campaign, believe it or not, is reaching out to Taylor Swift.

Trump has a problem with women and, more, importantly, suburban independent women. Let’s be frank here — Trump wins Republican women. Look at Trump’s performance among Republican women in New Hampshire — decidedly not a MAGA state. Abortion, the Access Hollywood tape and even the E Jean Carroll verdict will do little to affect trump’s final vote tally among Republican women. But things get interesting when we turn to suburban independent women.

image via nypost

Nikki Haley’s attacks against Trump in the run-up to South Carolina, her home state, have sharpened considerably. Haley has moved from the argument that Trump is a chaos candidate to that his brain is broken now to the fact that he cannot win suburban women. “He cannot win a general election ... he can't get independents,” Nikki Haley told NewsMax yesterday, sharpening her attack. “He can't get suburban women." Or, in the words of John Ellis (via PoliticalWire):

“Trump’s graceless and weirdly angry ‘victory speech’ in New Hampshire was incredibly stupid, politically speaking. He won. There was no need to use the occasion to demand that Haley drop out, to say that she would ‘be under investigation’ if she won — and to suggest there are skeletons in Haley’s closet that ‘she doesn’t want to talk about.'”

“Trump’s ‘victory speech’ will be long forgotten in a week or two. But it’s part of a pattern of behavior that has come to be part of his ‘brand.’ That’s fine in the GOP primary electorate universe. He has more than enough support across all the demographic sub-groups to win the nomination, quickly and decisively. It’s not fine in the general election universe. If 37% or 38% or 40% of suburban women think you’re a jerk and a bully, you’ll lose.”

It was, in fine, an unforced error. Trump could have been gracious in his biggest win of the 2024 campaign season, but he has a long history of going off script, particularly when it involves a women and a women of color. And Trump needs suburban white women in order to beat President Biden.

How will the E Jean Carroll verdict affect this? A jury found that Trump sexually abused her, the unprecedented effect of which on the electorate cannot be minimized. E Jean Carroll has done what none of the Republican primary candidates for President this cycle have done — she stood head-to-head against Trump and won. Her verdict was massive and will probably force Trump to sell a property in order to appeal. “It was an astonishing discovery for me – he’s nothing,” Carroll said on Rachel Maddow’s show, according to The Guardian. She also compared him to “a walrus snorting” and “a rhino flopping his hands.” Her conclusion? “He can be knocked down.” Will Carroll continue to speak out? Will she be on the stage at the Democrat Convention? What effect will she have on suburban white women?

Borborygmous have been Trump’s invective against women. Last election cycle there was the Access Hollywood tape, where “Teflon Don” Trump largely escaped any sort of reckoning, even as Billy Bush was essentially cancelled from the entertainment industry. Trump attacks against women seem, this election cycle at least, even more vicious and pronounced than his attacks on men like Ron DeSantis or even spineless Vivek, who fell out of favor with Trump World when his poll numbers rose in the Iowa caucus run-up. Trump has this time around reserved a special kind of cruelty aimed directly at women.

He called CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins — in her first big televised gig — a “nasty person,” en route to steamrolling her in May of last year. Trump then went on Meet the Press in September, again with a new host, and steamrolled her as well. Is it part of his campaign strategy to single out and over talk brand new women political hosts?

And then there is the matter of Taylor Swift. It is a curious thing to watch the alt right go absolutely insane over the most famous pop singer in the world. “With the Kansas City Chiefs headed to Super Bowl LVIII, influential MAGA Media personalities have started circulating conspiracy theories about the pop superstar, promoting the deranged notion that she is part of a sprawling psychological operations plot staged by the NFL and Democratic Party to deliver the 2024 presidential election to President Joe Biden,” is how Oliver Darcy of Reliable Sources put it.

Swift is becoming increasingly political, which is angering the alt-right, which used to worship her. In September, she registered 35,000 new voters, and — wild guess — they are probably not MAGA voters. One poll even claims that 18% of voters could be influenced by a Swift endorsement. Other than that and absent an actual endorsement, what is driving MAGA to so much more than usual online conspiracy thinking? Probably sports, in the run-up to the Super bowl. And then there’s Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ star tight end. The MAGA universe, for reasons mainly testosteronal, are sports obsessives. Trump broke not only the wall between reality television and politics, but he has broken the wall between sports and politics as well. “The love story that linked her world with the N.F.L. has proved incendiary,” writes Jonathan Wiseman of the Times. “Mr. Kelce’s advertisements promoting Pfizer’s Covid vaccine and Bud Light — already a target of outrage from the right over a social media promotion with a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney — added fuel to that raging fire.” So there’s that. And then there’s Dobbs.

Finally, the suburbs are not nearly as red as they were during the COVID era, where lockdowns were rejected in the suburbs. School closings are in the rear-view mirror of history and what has come up to replace it is the overreach of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — a decision that Trump brags about. I wrote last November about the election results, where Virginia — and other states with large suburban counties — self-corrected rightwards shifts during the COVID-era, as the extremism of the Supreme Court in Dobbs became felt:

Regarding the reproductive rights overreach by Republicans, one need look no further than the state of Pennsylvania. Purple Bucks County, incidentally, also pushed back against curriculum overreach by the Republican party and their cult of wokeness. Further, Pennsylvania, which was once a complicated state on the subject of abortion, is now regarded as “remarkably stable” as per Ron Brownstein. Democrats, among other electoral accomplishments, expanded their majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Add Ohio — a fire engine red state — which voted by more than 13 points to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution. However one falls on the subject of abortion rights, very few people are absolutist — barring even cases of rape and incest — as many conservatives are.

All in all this is not a good formula for the Republican party with suburban women.

But it suits BidenWorld just fine.

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“To worship at the altar of mega-scale and to convince yourself that you should be the one making world-historic decisions on behalf of a global citizenry that did not elect you and may not share your values or lack thereof, you have to dispense with numerous inconveniences—humility and nuance among them. Many titans of Silicon Valley have made these trade-offs repeatedly. YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Meta), and Twitter (which Elon Musk insists on calling X) have been as damaging to individual rights, civil society, and global democracy as Facebook was and is. Considering the way that generative AI is now being developed throughout Silicon Valley, we should brace for that damage to be multiplied many times over in the years ahead. The behavior of these companies and the people who run them is often hypocritical, greedy, and status-obsessed. But underlying these venalities is something more dangerous, a clear and coherent ideology that is seldom called out for what it is: authoritarian technocracy. As the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley have matured, this ideology has only grown stronger, more self-righteous, more delusional, and—in the face of rising criticism—more aggrieved. The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement.” (Adrienne LaFrance/The Atlantic)

“Leading the lurch from tragedy to farce are the Bobblehead Doll conservative influencers and their legion of followers. Besides their ability to turn political extremism into big bucks, the Bobblehead Dolls share a physical anomaly in which their heads appear to be too large for their bodies. They are Charlie Kirk, rightwing nepo-baby whose dad founded Turning Point USA for young conservatives, which the younger Kirk now runs; former Steve Bannon protege at Breitbart, and founder of the Daily Wire Ben Shapiro, and Jack Posobiec, white nationalist with a podcast and 2.4 million Xitter followers. As the Texas border defense spectacle commenced, the Bobblehead Dolls cosplayed Army, with Shapiro and Posobiec sporting Zelensky-esque beards and olive drab t-shirts on their vodcasts and pods. But by Sunday, something strange had happened to the battle plan. The miniature information corporals were diverted toward an apparently more urgent front: a psyop using the Super Bowl and a gorgeous blonde all-American global pop superstar.” (American Political Freakshow/Nina Burleigh)

“So, this presidential campaign will be narrated as a struggle of good against evil—evil being of course Donald Trump and the prospect of the end of American democracy. And good is the Biden administration, Joe Biden—maybe not great, but good, at least in the very basic sense that Joe Biden is not trying to put an end to American democracy. I believe that. I will vote for Joe Biden for those reasons. But to me, what’s so painful and frankly surreal when I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy in this domestic narrative. For me, the entire experience of October 7^th has been most surreal in the way that I have seen people who I generally think of in many contexts as good people, as decent people, supporting things that for me seem so fundamentally, profoundly indecent. And I think about the people who lead Biden’s foreign policy. People who went to schools very much like mine, whose life experience in many ways has been very much like mine, and people that I think I generally describe as kind of fundamentally benign figures and may in their personal lives be very benign. And then I see the things that the US is doing, and I feel just a very profound cognitive dissonance. And particularly in the last couple of days given the Biden administration’s decision to suspend US funding for UNRWA, which is the UN agency that works with Palestinian refugees.” (The Beinart Notebook)

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