Tens of thousands of Americans registered to vote within the 24-hour period after Taylor Swift encouraged her fans to do so in a rare politically-minded Instagram post.
Up to 65,000 people registered in the hours after Swift broke her typical political silence on Instagram Sunday evening, a representative for Vote.org told BuzzFeed News and confirmed with TIME. That’s a sharp rise for a single-day period compared to the number of new registrations made in the full months of September and August, which saw 190,178 and 56,669 new voters registered in total, respectively.
“Thank God for Taylor Swift,” Kamari Guthrie of Vote.org, a nonprofit organization that provides Americans with voter registration details and other information, told BuzzFeed News.
The Reputation singer turned heads over the weekend with an Instagram post, in which she endorsed Democratic Tennessee candidates Phil Bredesen for Senate and Jim Cooper for House of Representatives. She also slammed Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn, a U.S. representative, and her record. Swift urged her 112 million Instagram followers to register to vote — reminding fans based in Tennessee that Oct. 9 was the last day for them to register ahead of the midterm elections.
Guthrie of Vote.org says the non-profit organization saw a bump particularly in Tennessee, where 2,144 of the 5,183 new voter registrations in the state this month came within the last day and a half.
Swift, who’s typically silent on politics, has been criticized by some for not using her massive platform to engage fans on political issues. “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now,” Swift wrote in her Sunday post.
Her endorsements were met with praise and criticism from her wide fanbase and others, including President Donald Trump. He told reporters on Monday that he likes “Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now.”
