Kamala Harris noted, however, that she still won’t be rooting for the Kansas City Chiefs: “I am a 49ers fan, but who’s mad at anyone for being loyal to their team, right?”
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By Reid J. Epstein
Reid J. Epstein covers Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He consulted a list of Taylor Swift’s song titles to fit them into this story.
- Sept. 20, 2024, 12:21 p.m. ET
Vice President Kamala Harris has received countless endorsements from fellow Democrats and liberal celebrities, but she has made clear that the nod from Taylor Swift just hits different.
Ms. Harris broke her weeklong silence about the pop superstar’s debate-night endorsement, delivered without advance notice less than an hour after the face-off last week with former President Donald J. Trump.
“I am very proud to have the support of Taylor Swift,” Ms. Harris said in a video published on Friday by Wired magazine. “She’s an incredible artist. I really respect the courage that she has had in her career to stand up for what she believes is right. But we were on different sides of the Super Bowl last year. I am a 49ers fan, but who’s mad at anyone for being loyal to their team, right? So there you go.”
For the uninitiated — whoever that might be — Ms. Swift is a very public fan of the Kansas City Chiefs, for whom Travis Kelce, her boyfriend, is a tight end. Ms. Harris was trying to stay magnanimous about the fact that the Chiefs, who have won back-to-back championships, defeated her San Francisco 49ers in last season’s Super Bowl (and the 2020 edition of the game).
Throughout the 10-minute appearance, recorded on Wednesday in Washington and published on Friday morning, Ms. Harris held poster boards with questions from Google searches about herself, and then answered them.
The Wired appearance was not quite an interview, but it did track with the Harris campaign’s recent strategy of trying to have her speak to an array of mostly friendly audiences about her candidacy.
Nearly all of her answers were either versions of her stump speech or things she often repeats when discussing her life story. There were few policy questions about her campaign. She did not mention Mr. Trump’s social media pronouncement that he “hates” Ms. Swift.
Ms. Harris stopped short of asking Mr. Trump for another debate, as some of her aides have done, but she described the event as one of the best days of her campaign.
“That was quite enjoyable,” she said. “I enjoyed the debate.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein
See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Kansas City Chiefs, San Francisco 49ers, Kamala Harris, Taylor Swift
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Source: nytimes.com
