Taylor Swift’s presence at Chiefs games has rankled some conservative football fans for over a year now. The backlash during the 2023–24 NFL season, however, didn’t adversely impact her popularity–even among Republicans. In fact, I wrote a piece on the eve of last year’s Super Bowl titled, “Right-wing attacks haven’t dented Taylor Swift’s popularity.”
The post highlighted data showing that Republicans still had fairly favorable views of the pop superstar despite the so-called “MAGA meltdown” over her in the weeks preceding the big game–a backlash that included commentators allied with Donald Trump declaring a “holy war” against her. Swift had the exact same favorability rating of 51% among Republicans in a Feb. 4–6, 2024 YouGov/Economist Poll that she had in YouGov polling from both August and October 2023 (although the percent of Republicans with an unfavorable view ticked up significantly from 2023 to February 2024). The piece concluded:
One plausible reason why the right-wing attacks have not affected Swift’s popularity is that these messages have not yet been received by the majority of Americans who don’t pay that much attention to politics. This could change if her opposition to Trump becomes especially salient during the general election campaign.
The graph below shows that this is precisely what happened.
You can see that Swift’s favorability rating among Republicans was consistently in the high 40s to low 50s from August 2023 to August 2024. But that share quickly plummeted down to just 26% in a Sept. 15–17, 2024 YouGov/Economist Polls that was conducted shortly after both her endorsement of Kamala Harris on September 10 and Trump’s September 15 social media post proclaiming, “I hate Taylor Swift.” The percentage of Republicans who rated her unfavorably after these events similarly surged to a record high of 67%.
The graph further shows that Swift’s GOP favorability rating has rebounded a bit since her endorsement of Harris was a major storyline in the 2024 presidential campaign. Even with that uptick, though, her popularity among Republicans is still down sharply from 51% last year to 34% in the February 2–4, 2025, YouGov/Economist Poll.
The inevitable backlash against television cutaways of Taylor Swift cheering on Travis Kelce during the Super Bowl should, therefore, have an especially receptive Republican audience on Sunday.
