I will begin this article by "dating" myself, to prove what a fuddy-duddy I truly am. I do this to avoid anyone who might confuse me with a starry-eyed tween fan of Taylor Swift (not an easy mistake to make, but still...). To wit: the first time I heard the more-modern usage of the term "Swifties," I was confused. To me, a "Swifty" referred to a piece of writing -- a rather amusing juxtaposition of a statement and an adverb, usually used to punnily poke fun at some flamboyant or way-too-cute sentence. The nomenclature comes from the fuller form of the put-down, a "Tom Swifty." This references the main character in a series of young-adult books written a very long time ago about a teenage supergenius with unlimited financial resources, who invented all sorts of futuristic things and battled the forces of evil (who were always ready to thwart Tom's plans to use his inventions for good).

Need an example (or some more information about Tom Swift Sr. and Jr.)? How about:

"I previously wrote about this using a different angle, back in 2017," Chris said, obliquely.

Get it? Or was that just way too acute for you? (My apologies, but I just couldn't resist... heh....)

From Wikipedia's "Tom Swifty" page, here are a few much better examples:

• "If you want me, I shall be in the attic," said Tom, loftily.
• "Don't ask me why I was at the mausoleum," Tom said cryptically.
• "I forgot what I needed at the store," Tom said listlessly.

Verbs can also be used to create a Swifty:

• "We just struck oil!" Tom gushed.
• "Stay away from that turtle!" Tom snapped.

Some are a little more complex than others, requiring more thought to decipher, such as:

• "I'm wearing a ribbon around my arm," said Tom with abandon.
• "I'm having an affair with my gamekeeper," said the lady, chattily.

Being Wikipedia, the entries change over time. In that earlier article I cited two of my favorite Swifties, one of which no longer seems to have made the cut:

• "Get to the back of the ship!" Tom said sternly.
• "I have no flowers," Tom said lackadaisically.

I offer up these amusing examples merely to prove how out of touch I truly am with today's pop culture. Because nowadays, a Swiftie (or Swifty -- it seems either is acceptable) is no longer a sentence, but instead a proper noun. It describes a fan of pop megastar Taylor Swift. And Swift made some big political news this week, by dropping her endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz mere moments after the debate between Harris and Donald Trump concluded. And this could be a celebrity endorsement that actually matters.

Swift's fans are legion. She has close to 300 million followers on the social media platform she used to endorse Harris. She got 10 million "likes" within a single day. The official government site "Vote.gov" saw an influx of 400,000 people clicking over from Swift's message. Other non-governmental "how to register to vote" sites also saw sharp spikes in the first day. The Harris campaign reacted swiftly (couldn't resist that one, either...) and offered up their own campaign version of a "friendship bracelet" (which is an iconic Swiftie fan thing to have). They sold out within hours.

The reaction from the right has been somewhat unhinged, to say the least. Just to troll JD Vance, Swift signed her endorsement statement:

With love and hope,

Taylor Swift
Childless Cat Lady

Vance (at least so far) hasn't completely blown his top at this dig, but plenty of other Trump supporters have. The worst of these seriously cross the line of toxic masculinity (if not downright threats). One conservative commentator responded with an attempt to bring immigrants into the discussion, in (of course) the most vile way possible: "Taylor Swift, you are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain't pretty!" Not to be outdone, Elon Musk, a.k.a. Mr. Toxic Masculinity Personified, went even further in the "veiled threats of sexual violence" category, tweeting out: "Fine Taylor ... you win ... I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life." To which the most appropriate response is, of course: "Ew!"

Just as, with Donald Trump, you can almost always say: "There's a tweet for that," and then dig up some past idiocy he's sent out; with Taylor Swift it is: "Oh, she's got a song for that." The song is rather appropriately titled: "You Need To Calm Down," and it starts out with her reading some nasty post some stranger sent her, when she first wakes up:

You are somebody that I don't know
But you're taking shots at me like it's Patrón
And I'm just like: "Damn, it's 7:00 A.M."
Say it in the street, that's a knock-out
But you say it in a tweet, that's a cop-out
And I'm just like: "Hey, are you okay?"

The chorus begins with:

You need to calm down
You're being too loud

Not to put too fine a point on it, Taylor Swift not only has lots of experience walking away from toxic males, she has in fact made mountains of money singing about this very subject. Which, of course, causes toxic males' heads to explode. Their reaction is basically: "Why can't she be happy making me a sandwich in the kitchen, or [more to the point] making babies?" They just can't wrap their tiny little testosterone-soaked minds around a beautiful, talented, and outrageously successful woman who has no earthly use for them.

But getting back to the point, will Swift's endorsement matter? Politically, celebrity endorsements often fail to move the needle much, in terms of racking up actual votes. However, there are some megastar exceptions to this general rule. The best example is probably Oprah Winfrey endorsing Barack Obama in his first run for president -- notable because it was the first time Oprah had ever endorsed any politician. Oprah was so hugely influential -- across all kinds of voter demographics -- that her endorsement did indeed matter to a lot of people. Taylor Swift has the same sort of draw, and most of her fans are so devoted to her that it could indeed spur a whole lot of them to actually vote for Kamala Harris.

Republicans pooh-pooh the army of Swifties at their peril. They are desperately trying to convince themselves that it's not going to matter, often resorting to sneering about how "14-year-old girls can't vote." But this ignores a very basic fact.

Taylor Swift released her first album in 2006. Now let's not even use extremes here, and instead count from her first "crossover" album (she began as a Country star and only later moved over to the Rock/Pop genres), which was released in 2010. Sure, a lot of Swift's fans are very young, so let's use as an example a 12-year-old who bought the album Speak Now when it first came out. Fast-forward to today, and that fan is now 26 years old, meaning this could be the third presidential election they are eligible to vote in. See, the thing about tweens and teenagers is that, over time, they grow up.

It's a fact in American politics that "the youth vote" is elusive and quite fickle. A whole lot of young people just don't vote. But sometimes they do -- which can create a wave of support that is usually missed by the pollsters before it happens. This happened in a big way with Barack Obama, and since then young people have been the key to several elections -- when they bother to show up, that is. They don't always manage to, often reverting to their historically low turnout levels.

The way I see it, whether Swift's endorsement of Harris turns out to be meaningful or not might just depend on how much she follows up in the next two months. Will Swift actually appear on stage with Harris? Will she open a Harris rally (or even close one, if Kamala decides to give her star billing) with a few songs? Will she appear in a television ad for Harris? Will she visit a few battleground states? If Swift is rather passive in her support and doesn't do any of those things, the chances of her making a real difference have to be seen as lower, but if she does lean into it she could wind up being a game-changer.

Remember -- this election is going to be close. Really close. The margins in the battleground states are likely to be just as razor-thin as they have been in the last two presidential elections. Ten or twenty thousand voters that nobody expected to show up could tilt entire states.

And guess what I learned from her biography (a fact which the Democratic governor is already gleefully pointing out)?

Taylor Swift was born in Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania could be the keystone to the entire presidential race.

["...Chris stated."]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant