Taylor Swift has been dragged into the close Virginia gubernatorial race with an ad campaign targeting Swiftie fans by Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe.
The 31-year-old pop singer started appearing in Facebook, Instagram, and Google search ads Tuesday from the McAuliffe campaign that paints his Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin as the one who helped music mogul Scooter Braun purchase Swift’s master recordings in 2019, the Verge.com reported. (RELATED: Taylor Swift Surprises 11-Year-Old Fan With ‘Fairytale’ Gift After The Girl Wrote Letter To Mailman Thanking Him During Pandemic)
Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is tugging on the heart strings of Taylor Swift fans with new digital ads highlighting rival Glenn Youngkin’s bad blood with the music star.https://t.co/BWVbnzf9mK pic.twitter.com/DEIz13EvbY
— Axios (@axios) October 5, 2021
The five-figure ad buy shows images of the “Blank Space” hitmaker and Youngkin interlaid with the #WeStandWithTaylor hashtag. This was a popular tag used by Swifties to show support to Taylor during her battle over her master recordings with Braun. (RELATED: Photos From Joe Alwyn Have Taylor Swift Fans Convinced The Two Are Quarantining Together During Pandemic)
Youngkin retired as co-CEO of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group where he helped Scooter acquire Big Machine Label Group, which owned the master recordings of the “Shake It Off” hitmaker’s first six albums and some of her biggest hits, NPR noted.
Swift fans know all too well that there’s bad blood between Braun and the “Me!” hitmaker after he refused, for a time, to sell them back to the singer.
Christian Martinez, a spokesperson for the Republican nominee called the move “pathetic.”
“Terry McAuliffe has reached the stage of desperation in his campaign where he’s rolling out the most baseless attacks to see what sticks,” Martinez shared in a statement to NPR.
And despite Terry’s attempt to pin Carlyle on Youngkin, the piece noted, McAuliffe himself is an investor in the company.
Renzo Olivari, a campaign spokesperson, said McAuliffe was a “passive” Carlyle investor by 2019, at the time of the sale of Taylor’s masters, and now owns less than $5,000 in Carlyle stock, the Associated Press reported. The report added that the amount was down from the Democrat candidate’s initial investment of at least $690,000 in Carlyle funds between December 2007 and 2016.
It is unclear if this micro-targeting effort directed at Swift fans by McAuliffe will be enough to allow him to pull ahead from Youngkin. The latest poll by FiveThirtyEight put the race between the two at a dead heat.