Beyoncé wasn’t just on the playlist at Vice President Kamala Harris’s Houston rally on Friday, she was also a special guest.
The question is just how much Beyoncé can help Harris. The rally in deep-red Texas comes as the vice president finds herself in a dead heat nationally (and in most swing states) against former President Donald Trump, and as Democrats’ Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred narrows the gap with his GOP rival, Sen. Ted Cruz.
Friday, Beyoncé became the latest influential celebrity to make a splashy endorsement of Harris — someone she’d already implicitly backed by allowing Harris to use a track from her album Lemonade as her campaign song. She joins the likes of Taylor Swift and Oprah, both of whom threw their weight behind the Harris campaign earlier this year, alongside other celebrities like Megan Thee Stallion, Quavo, and Charli XCX.
While celebrity endorsements haven’t necessarily been found to sway voters from one candidate to another, Beyoncé’s endorsement could motivate her fans to participate in the election. That could come in the form of increased voter registration, or higher turnout among young voters, women, and Black voters — all of whom are both key members of Beyoncé’s audience and critical Democratic constituencies that the party needs to show up in large numbers.
Given how closely contested this election has been, any advantage — including just the boost in attention from a Beyoncé endorsement — could prove important. More than others in recent memory, polls suggest this race could come down to small numbers of votes in key states.
“Even though the effects are generally thought of as modest, in elections that turn on a small number of votes in a handful of swing states, any effect could be significant,” Bowling Green State University professor David J. Jackson previously told Vox.
The impact Beyoncé’s endorsement could have
Celebrity endorsements haven’t necessarily been found to persuade voters — though they can gin up enthusiasm among people who follow them.
Oprah Winfrey’s support of former President Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary is the rare example of a specific endorsement having a tangible, scientifically studied impact on candidate choice. According to a 2013 Northwestern University study, her endorsement — one of just a few political statements of support she’s made — translated to an uptick in turnout, donations, and approximately a million votes in favor of Obama.
A key caveat of that study is that it centered on a Democratic primary, when voters were choosing from candidates with the same party affiliation, rather than a general election, when candidates tend to have major partisan differences. Additionally, experts note that endorsements could provide voters with more useful information in a primary when there may be a broader mix of new and familiar options. In a general election, if the candidates are more well-established, endorsements could be less likely to offer novel insights.
“That was a different environment because that was a primary election between Democrats where Oprah weighed in to that contest,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden previously told CBS 58, a regional affiliate in Wisconsin. “So everyone participating is essentially a Democrat or sympathetic to a Democrat and that’s where an endorsement could really matter.”
That case study, though, shows how a prominent celebrity could wield their cachet. They might strengthen a candidate’s connection with a specific age group or demographic, and they could help pique people’s interest.
“If you suddenly see it in your social media feed or on TikTok or wherever, and see your favorite celebrity has done an interview or had a conversation with a politician, that politician is much more likely to get traction just by having that entry into people’s attention spans,” Josephine Harmon, an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University in London, previously told Northeastern Global News.
Beyoncé’s endorsement could bolster Harris’s credibility among her listeners and add to her appeal given the singer’s popularity and clout. A fan who was already leaning Democrat could be motivated to register to vote, or attend a rally, because of her endorsement.
Swift’s September endorsement made some of these effects clear. Following Swift’s Instagram endorsement of Harris, which urged people to register to vote, 406,000 people clicked on the link to Vote.gov, which directs people to different state voting websites. It’s not clear how many followed through with their registrations, but the spike in interest, alone, was notable.
Beyoncé, given her sizable following and reach (she boasts 314 million Instagram followers to Swift’s 283 million), could well have a comparable effect.