New Poll: 1 in 5 Americans, 1 in 3 Republicans believe Taylor Swift election conspiracy
- SOURCE: Monmouth, 2/14/23
John,
It’s official: the Chiefs are Super Bowl winners, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are the biggest power couple of 2024, and, according to one of the most accurate pollsters in the country, a third of Republicans think Swift and Kelce’s relationship is a government conspiracy to help Biden win re-election later this year.
🤦
Of course, the claim has absolutely zero basis in reality. But the sheer speed with which this bananas theory became a fact for 60 million Americans says a lot about right-wing propaganda and what we’re up against in the 2024 election.
The roots of the Chiefs/Biden conspiracy started last year when a former running back for the Houston Texans made a joke on a podcast that the NFL was scripted.
Then, in the fall, right-wing media personalities like Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk criticized Travis Kelce for appearing in a Pfizer ad promoting COVID-19 vaccinations.
Those attacks (and Kelce’s ad for Bud Light) led to a surge in online hate towards the couple from right-wing personalities and online influencers on “X” and TikTok.
By the time the Super Bowl kicked off last Sunday, Swift/Biden/NFL conspiracy theories were running wild through right-wing media and social media.
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called Swift a “Pentagon asset.” Leaders in the QAnon movement (including the actual guy who organized the “stop the steal” rally that led to January 6th) used a lack of grass stains on the players' jerseys to argue that the Super Bowl was rigged.
And the most important part of all this? The 50 million Americans who now believe the wackadoodle conspiracy theory about Swift saw these lies amplified and shared by the right-wing media, influencers, and even their friends and family over and over again.
That’s how it works, John. It’s the same playbook that led to our current reality where a majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden and Democrats.
So that’s a lot, but the good news is that COURIER has a playbook that works too. Our ten battleground newsrooms craft free, factual local news that sticks and corrects misinformation. And we meet people in the same social media feeds and email inboxes where right-wing lies and conspiracies spread.
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Thank you,
COURIER team