Are Taylor Swift and Joe Biden conspiring together? On Monday night, the president was openly asked to “confirm or deny that there is an active conspiracy” between him and the pop singer by late-night presenter Seth Meyers.
“Where are you getting this information?” Biden responded. “It’s classified.”
The two were joking about the latest conspiracy theory that’s been bubbling under the surface for the last few weeks — that Swift, her tremendous popularity, and her saturated media coverage in the lead-up to the Super Bowl (she’s dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce) is somehow a government psyop to influence American minds into supporting Biden’s reelection effort.
The theory has bounced around the conservative media echo chamber and even garnered some mainstream coverage. After being promoted on Fox News by host Jesse Watters, it spawned a field day of coverage on network news, daytime talk shows, and national radio.
It’s unclear what the origin of this conspiracy theory is, but one poll helped boost its reach. In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, Monmouth University asked whether respondents had heard about the idea of Swift being involved in a “covert government effort to help Joe Biden win the presidential election” and “Do you think that a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election actually exists, or not?”
Thus did a viral conspiracy-theory joke — it’s still unclear how serious it ever was — go fully mainstream, all the way to a late-night TV show and the president himself.
Here’s the thing about polls: Many times, they don’t really tell us what we think they’re telling us. Sometimes we have to peer deeper to find out what they’re actually saying.
The actual Swift conspiracy theory isn’t one unified concept. As my colleagues at Vox have explained before, it’s actually a whole bunch of ideas about Swift and her popularity being somehow artificially engineered and a sign of some covert effort to influence minds.
The idea of this being political was made more popular in elite right-wing spaces — pushed by failed GOP presidential candidates on social media and Jesse Watters in primetime, all to suggest that Swift is part of a psychological operation being used by the Pentagon or the federal government to convince her followers to support Democrats like Biden.
For many people, the Monmouth poll’s findings were jarring. Some 18 percent of respondents said that yes, they did believe that a “covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election” existed.
That number mostly consists of who you might expect: 71 percent of believers identify as Republicans, and an even greater percentage, 83 percent, say they’ll likely back Trump this fall. And the numbers for those who had heard of this kind of conspiracy theory at all were similarly eye-opening: 46 percent of Americans had been exposed to the idea.
No wonder the results went viral.
But dig a little deeper and the poll results can start to make you question your priors. A decent chunk of those who said they believed in the theory were actually unaware of it before Monmouth contacted them, leading to a fundamental question: How many believers actually “believe” in such a conspiracy theory?
There are two poll results that should cause some introspection. First, among those who believe Taylor Swift is a pro-Biden psyop, 42 percent had not heard of the conspiracy theory before Monmouth contacted them. And of those who were previously aware of it, it turns out more were Democrats (56 percent of them) than Republicans (46 percent).
Though the Swift psyop conspiracy theory may have originated among conservatives, it appears to have spread more widely through liberal and Democratic social networks and mainstream media — like through mainstream coverage of right-wing media, and eventually coverage of the poll and Meyer’s Biden interview. According to Patrick Murray, Monmouth’s polling director, that’s a significant detail, since it’s showing how viral ideas spread.
At the same time, the poll indicates that although comparatively fewer Republicans have heard about this conspiracy theory, they are much more likely to believe it to be true — about a third of respondents who believe the theory are Republicans. That doesn’t mean that they’re all in agreement about the specifics of this supposed deep-state operation. But it does suggest a kind of rally-around-the-flag effect for Republicans — who may be more willing to “incorporate this in some way, shape, or form into their belief system” about American politics, pop culture, and media, according to Murray.
But whether the number of true believers is 18 percent or 14 percent or 10 percent, the idea is out there — enough that even the president is leaning into it, and maybe feeding the conspiracy even more.
