What it's like to be endorsed by Taylor Swift

Phil Bredesen wasn’t expecting it in his wildest dreams.

It was a Sunday night in October, about a month out from the 2018 Senate election in Tennessee that had him locked in an uphill battle against then-Rep. Marsha Blackburn, and he and some of his campaign staff had just left a debate-prep session when the text came in.

A friend had messaged Bredesen’s communications director, Laura Zapata.

“She was like, ‘Congratulations for getting the Taylor Swift endorsement.’ And we were absolutely surprised — all of us on the campaign were surprised — when she posted,” Zapata told POLITICO. She called Bredesen and the rest of the team to share the good news.

Bredesen was familiar with the wildly popular country-singer-turned-pop-sensation who spent a chunk of her childhood in Nashville, where Bredesen once served as mayor. “I had met her a couple of times at events way back when I was governor,” he told POLITICO.

But they hadn’t talked in years and the endorsement — Swift’s first public foray into politics — came completely out of the blue. The campaign had never talked to her directly, let alone lobbied for the endorsement, and she didn’t reach out before or after announcing her support for Bredesen in an Instagram post.

With no direct line to Swift, they relied on their social media channels to pump the message, posting a story thanking her and digging through the archives to find photos of Bredesen with the rising songwriter at community events from his time in office.

Swift’s groundbreaking endorsement boosted the two-term governor’s national profile — and bumped up his street cred with his family.

“I have a lot of cousins and their families that live in New York, and some of them thought [the endorsement] was cooler than