Taylor Swift is Time magazine’s person of the year. The announcement came just a week after Spotify announced she was the most-played artist on the streaming platform.
Swift was picked from a group of nine finalists that included Barbie, King Charles III, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, among others.
Swift, 33, has a lot of sway these days – not just musically, but socially and even politically, said Jeffrey Dudas, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. Swift transcends partisan politics, Dudas told Connecticut Public’s “The Wheelhouse.”
“There isn’t a real big partisan gap in her approval rating between Republicans and Democrats,” said Dudas, who examines how pop culture and politics intersect. “There’s a little bit of one, but not what you might expect given the sort of efforts by conservative media recently to paint her most recently as a kind of progressive.”
An NBC News national poll recently had Taylor Swift’s favorability rating at 40% – higher than the presumptive major party candidates in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
In September, the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org reported a surge of 35,000 registrations after Swift encouraged fans to register to vote.
Swift’s year included the wildly popular Eras Tour and concert movie, the release of her reimagined “1989” album, and her closely watched relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. She's even the subject of college courses.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was Time's 2022 person of the year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
