Why a Travis Kelce Endorsement Would Mean Even More Than Taylor Swift’s

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Why a Travis Kelce Endorsement Would Mean Even More Than Taylor Swift’s
NEW HEIGHTS
Alex Thomas
Updated Sep. 11, 2024 3:10PM EDT Published Sep. 11, 2024 2:25PM EDT
opinionTravis Kelce
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters

The conventional wisdom is that celebrity endorsements don’t matter. Bruce Springsteen, denim boss-god that he is, cannot move votes with an endorsement. Neither can George Clooney. And so, we should assume, even Taylor Swift’s Tuesday night endorsement of Kamala Harris won’t do much in November.

But Taylor Swift has an audience, or maybe an army, of (mostly) young women following her. That’s why right-wing pundits lost their collective minds over a potential Swift endorsement last year, branding it a Pentagon psyop. And her endorsement was aimed at those women. She says she’s worried about AI deepfakes. She reminds first-time voters to vote and to vote early. She posts a link to register. Last time she posted that link, 35,000 people registered to vote.

And maybe her endorsement doesn’t matter, because nobody actually thought—despite the AI deepfake that Donald Trump posted—that Taylor Swift was going to endorse Trump. But what about Travis Kelce?

According to one anonymous “insider,” a Harris endorsement from Kelce could be coming “very soon,” adding, “After Taylor revealed her endorsement for Kamala, Travis knew what he had to do. He understood the assignment.”

Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, is number three on the Spotify sports podcast charts. People are listening to him, and the crowd that’s listening to him are generally what we call “low-information voters” They’re getting more of their news from Barstool and Pat McAffee than Politico. They are (primarily) young men. On Twitter, the New Heights fanbase once voted to call themselves “the Jabronis,” which is obviously a more apt pejorative than “low-information voters.”

I hate the term “low-information voters.” These are just normal, (mostly) sane guys who don’t feel like tuning into the dumpster-fire-in-a-flood that is the American political ecosystem. But more, and more, these guys are becoming “shitty-information voters.” They’re watching Jordan Peterson cosplay as a fun guy on Kill Tony; or they’re hearing Aaron Rodgers bashing the covid vaccine on Pat McAffee’s show and these (mostly) sane guys are nodding along. In the process, they are becoming a little less sane.

They’re starting to think the modern world is rigged against them, which is the main argument of figures like Jordan Peterson or Donald Trump. What has preserved the sanity of the jabronis is that they have mostly ignored the political sphere. But via the culture war, the political sphere is sneaking up on them. And, for the record, they’d rather it not. The number one rule on the New Heights subreddit (which has over 46,000 users) is “no political posts.”

HOMEPAGE

Sportssubvertical orientation badge
Why a Travis Kelce Endorsement Would Mean Even More Than Taylor Swift’s
NEW HEIGHTS
Alex Thomas
Updated Sep. 11, 2024 3:10PM EDT Published Sep. 11, 2024 2:25PM EDT
opinionTravis Kelce
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters

The conventional wisdom is that celebrity endorsements don’t matter. Bruce Springsteen, denim boss-god that he is, cannot move votes with an endorsement. Neither can George Clooney. And so, we should assume, even Taylor Swift’s Tuesday night endorsement of Kamala Harris won’t do much in November.

But Taylor Swift has an audience, or maybe an army, of (mostly) young women following her. That’s why right-wing pundits lost their collective minds over a potential Swift endorsement last year, branding it a Pentagon psyop. And her endorsement was aimed at those women. She says she’s worried about AI deepfakes. She reminds first-time voters to vote and to vote early. She posts a link to register. Last time she posted that link, 35,000 people registered to vote.

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And maybe her endorsement doesn’t matter, because nobody actually thought—despite the AI deepfake that Donald Trump posted—that Taylor Swift was going to endorse Trump. But what about Travis Kelce?

According to one anonymous “insider,” a Harris endorsement from Kelce could be coming “very soon,” adding, “After Taylor revealed her endorsement for Kamala, Travis knew what he had to do. He understood the assignment.”

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Travis Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, is number three on the Spotify sports podcast charts. People are listening to him, and the crowd that’s listening to him are generally what we call “low-information voters” They’re getting more of their news from Barstool and Pat McAffee than Politico. They are (primarily) young men. On Twitter, the New Heights fanbase once voted to call themselves “the Jabronis,” which is obviously a more apt pejorative than “low-information voters.”

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I hate the term “low-information voters.” These are just normal, (mostly) sane guys who don’t feel like tuning into the dumpster-fire-in-a-flood that is the American political ecosystem. But more, and more, these guys are becoming “shitty-information voters.” They’re watching Jordan Peterson cosplay as a fun guy on Kill Tony; or they’re hearing Aaron Rodgers bashing the covid vaccine on Pat McAffee’s show and these (mostly) sane guys are nodding along. In the process, they are becoming a little less sane.

They’re starting to think the modern world is rigged against them, which is the main argument of figures like Jordan Peterson or Donald Trump. What has preserved the sanity of the jabronis is that they have mostly ignored the political sphere. But via the culture war, the political sphere is sneaking up on them. And, for the record, they’d rather it not. The number one rule on the New Heights subreddit (which has over 46,000 users) is “no political posts.”

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I don’t know if a Travis Kelce endorsement would turn into many votes. Probably it won’t. We have this fantasy about celebrity endorsements. As one Swifty critic in the New York Times recently bemoaned, we carry on our impossible hope that celebrities, “through their sheer persuasive charisma, will save us from the hard work of politics itself.”

But what if we make the hard work fun? What if we made it look a little less like work? Again, I’m not arguing that Kelce can swing this thing. He can’t. But a Kelce endorsement stands alone in a media ecosystem that treats Trump as an American everyman selling a rational worldview. And a Kelce endorsement would now sit side-by-side with a Taylor Swift endorsement. These two are America’s it-couple at the moment. And—because it’s football season—they’re going to remain America’s it-couple through the election