Taylor Swift Breaks Record for Most AMAs Won by a Female Artist After Nabbing Artist of the Year
Taylor Swift is breaking records.
After opening the 2018 American Music Awards with a show-stopping performance of
“I Did Something Bad,” the “Look What You Made Me Do” singer went on to claim the
awards for Tour of the Year, Best Pop/Rock Album, and Favorite Female Artist Pop/Rock and
finally Artist of the Year — breaking the record for most AMA wins by a female artist.
Swift now has 23 AMA wins, surpassing Whitney Houston, and tied with the group, Alabama. Michael Jackson has 24.
While accepting her award for Artist of the Year, Swift called for her fans to head to the polls.
“Thank you for this incredible symbol of encouragement,” she told her fans. “And I just wanted to make a mention of the fact that this award and every single award given out tonight were voted on by the people, and you know what else is voted on by the people — is the midterm elections on Nov. 6. Get out and vote. I love you guys!”
Is it cool that she said all that? Of course it is. @taylorswift13 accepts the award for #AMAs Artist of the Year! 🎉 #TaylorSwiftAMAspic.twitter.com/EmTzjlB8uH
— American Music Awards (@AMAs) October 10, 2018
Swift — who revealed her political views for the first time in an Instagram post to fans earlier this week — was also called out by Billy Eichner earlier in the show, as he encouraged viewers to vote “like Taylor Swift told you to.”
In her post on Sunday, the previously apolitical superstar came out in favor of the Democratic candidate battling to become Tennessee’s next U.S. senator. In a lengthy essay, Swift said she couldn’t vote for Republican Marsha Blackburn due to her positions on issues such as equal pay, domestic violence and gay rights and instead threw her support behind former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat.
The 24 hours following Swift’s post saw an exponential increase in voter registration across the country.
“We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T.Swift’s post,” Kamari Guthrie, the director of communications for Vote.org told BuzzFeed News. That number is around half the new voters the country saw in the entire month of September.
Tennessee also saw an increase in registered voters after Swift’s post, specifically, 2,144 registrations in the last 36 hours. That’s out of 5,183 the state has seen in this month so far.
