Later this month, thousands of members of a massive international constituency plan to join a conference call in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Other such calls have convened Black women, White men, Republicans and even (in a nod to past comments from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance) cat ladies. But the group getting on the phone in a couple of weeks might have an influence that those others don’t.

Prepare for Swifties4Kamala.

A “Swiftie,” as you probably know, is a fan of musician Taylor Swift. Swift is one of the most famous celebrities in the world and has a (probably immeasurably) huge base of fans. Once President Joe Biden announced that he was no longer going to seek the Democratic nomination for president, some of Swift’s fans formed an ad hoc group to support his replacement. The effect might be that, six years after Swift first dipped her toes into politics, her fans could help swing a presidential election.

One reason that’s the case is that Swift’s profile has fairly recently skyrocketed. Google searches for her name were relatively steady until 2020, peaking with awards shows or album releases. With the launch of her Eras Tour last year, it surged. Swift has never been the focus of more search interest than she was in February of this year — the month of the Super Bowl in which her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, was playing.

YouGov polling shows that Swift’s favorability has increased since 2018 as well. In October that year, right about the time that she offered her endorsement of a (ultimately unsuccessful) Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, 46 percent of Americans viewed her favorably. In January of this year, that had climbed to 54 percent. Swift is now viewed favorably by most American men, women and Democrats. Her favorability improved among independents and Republicans, too, and surged in particular among younger Americans.

The stereotype that has followed Swift for years, of course, is that her fan base is largely made up of tween and young teenage girls. There’s an element of truth to that, certainly, but a 13-year-old Swift fan in 2018 is now a 19-year-old Swift fan who is old enough to vote.

Whether Swift endorses Harris remains to be seen. (Swifties4Kamala is not a function of the artist’s efforts.) But she may not need to do so to have an effect.

One of the shifts in the race that followed Harris’s rise to the nomination was that younger voters, shown in polling to be apathetic about the prospect of reelecting Biden, have begun shifting more favorably toward Harris. Several recent polls, including in swing states, have suggested that Harris’s improved position relative to Trump is in part a function of her enjoying wider margins with younger Americans.

Against Biden, Trump’s relative position with younger voters was weaker when pollsters filtered for the likelihood of voting. This is the central question with younger voters, as it always is: Will they actually turn out to vote? A deliberate effort to increase turnout within Swift’s fan base would probably benefit Harris. One reason that Biden won in 2020 after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 was that the electorate four years ago had a larger percentage of young voters.

And again, Swift is more popular, and interest in Swift is larger than it was four years ago. Her fan base is enthusiastic and centered on community and common identifiers in a way that didn’t exist to the same degree four years ago. If voting or pressing one’s parents to vote for Harris — for the potential first woman president — becomes even a small element of Swift fandom, it’s hard to know what the effect might be.

Should Swift take an active hand in stoking that engagement, the effects would probably be non-trivial. When she last year encouraged her Instagram followers to register to vote, tens of thousands did. If Swift encourages her fan base to make a plan to vote in November and to work with their parents or partners or friends to do so, voter turnout would increase. (Online community encouragement can have a demonstrable effect on the number of people casting a ballot.)

Again, this is without considering an explicit endorsement. If Swift does endorse Harris (as she did with Biden in 2020), this, too, might boost the Democrat’s vote total. A Suffolk University poll conducted for USA Today in May asked Americans whether a Swift endorsement would influence their vote choice. Most said it wouldn’t. But 9 percent of respondents said it might influence them at least a little — including 1 in 10 women, Americans under 35 and independents. This is probably overstated, but a Swiftian nudge would not do nothing.

The nature of this presidential contest appears, at the moment, to mirror what we saw in 2016 and 2020: a race that favors the Democrat nationally but that might come down to narrow vote totals in several swing states. Biden’s electoral vote majority was a function of fewer than 50,000 votes in three states four years ago. Getting a small segment of the massive Taylor Swift fan base to vote that otherwise wouldn’t? Hard to dismiss the idea that it could tip the balance.

Since August 2023, the state with the seventh-most search interest in Taylor Swift was Pennsylvania, believed to be the most likely state to swing the results of the 2024 presidential contest. Wisconsin was 14th.

This may not mean anything. Or it may mean that, after the surge in Swift’s popularity, everything has changed.

Authorities are investigating a burglary at former president Donald Trump’s campaign office in Ashburn, Va., after reviewing surveillance footage showing a man inside with a backpack strapped to his chest on Sunday.

The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said it responded to the burglary report about 9 p.m. Sunday and that a video showed a man inside wearing a dark baseball cap with insignia and a dark hoodie. The man’s backpack appears to be partially full in the still images from the surveillance video released by the sheriff’s office.

“It is rare to have the office of any political campaign or party broken into,” Sheriff Mike Chapman said in a statement. “We are determined to identify the suspect, investigate why it happened, and determine what may have been taken as well as what may have been left behind.”

Ashburn is a Northern Virginia suburb about 30 miles from downtown Washington. The sheriff’s office said the Trump for President campaign is leasing the office.

A spokesman for the sheriff said Monday that the Trump campaign office, which also serves as the headquarters of the Virginia 10th District Republican Committee, had been cleared out while law enforcement agencies from Loudoun County and other jurisdictions canvassed the location. They asked for the public’s help identifying the suspect.

“It’s an office park area, kind of a remote office park area, so there would not have been an awful lot of people” on Sunday night, spokesman Thomas Julia said. “Once we know who this person is and the motivation, we’ll have a second statement.”

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson said he knows “very little” about the incident.

“I got a phone call from my people this morning telling me that an intruder had somehow made his way in,” Anderson said. “They’ve handed it off to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office. It’s really in their hands, so we’re just in a wait-and-see mode.”

Anderson said he had not been briefed yet on whether anything was missing from the office.

This is a developing story and will be updated. Gregory S. Schneider and Teo Armus contributed to this report.

A Colorado jury on Monday found a former county election official guilty of seven charges connected to allowing a purported computer expert to copy election data from her office as Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and searched for evidence to prove it.

Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, was found guilty on seven of 10 charges, including several counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She will be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face prison time.

Peters is one of the few officials to face consequences for using their positions in local elections offices to try to prove false claims that took root after Trump’s defeat.

The verdict comes three months ahead of the 2024 presidential election and as Trump is already seeking to sow doubt about the fairness of the electoral outcome. As election officials around the nation have confronted years of hostility and suspicion about their work from those outside their offices, they have also sought to prevent — and prepare — threats from people working within.

Election experts have cited the breach in Mesa County as a consequence of falsehoods spread about voting systems. Peters has been embraced and championed by many of those who continue to falsely claim the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

Peters stood as 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett warned those gathered in his courtroom against verbal outbursts before he read the verdict. The decision came about four hours after closing arguments in the closely watched trial, which lasted more than a week. Peters did not show visible emotion as the verdict was read or as the judge ordered her to report to a probation office on Tuesday.

The jury found her not guilty of three counts: criminal impersonation, a count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and identity theft.

Prosecutors charged Peters in 2022 and accused her of helping secretly copy Dominion Voting Systems hard drives by sneaking a former professional surfer and purported computer expert into secure areas of her office in 2021 using someone else’s security badge. Within months, data from her office appeared online and was featured at a symposium held by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who continues to trumpet false claims about elections and seeks to end the use of machines that count ballots.

Closing arguments in the case began Monday, with prosecutors telling jurors that Peters tricked election workers and other public employees to let an outsider take images of the county’s election system hard drive to cast herself as a hero at a Lindell event.

“This case is simply about crimes committed by her in concert with others that were simply designed to be a coverup — and that this case is a simple case centered around the use of deceit to commit a fraud,” said prosecutor Robert Shapiro. “It’s not about computers, it’s not about election records. It’s about using deceit to trick and manipulate others … who were simply trying to do their job.”

Her attorney, John Case, maintained that Peters was seeking to save records to help determine if foreign individuals had accessed voting systems while ballots were still being tabulated.

He told jurors on Monday morning that they were the only thing “that stands between Clerk Peters and that government semi” truck. He sought to cast doubt that Peters stood to gain anything of value for her actions and said that she sought to find purpose in her job and community after her son died.

Peters, who did not testify, was the first election official to face criminal charges after the 2020 election, according to election experts.

Peters cast doubts on the 2020 election and raised further concerns after an April 2021 municipal election. Soon afterward, she met with Douglas Frank, a high school math teacher who has made appearances around the country to question how elections are conducted. Frank told Peters he believed an upcoming software update would delete data that would prove the election had been rigged, he told The Washington Post in 2022. She sought help, and he relayed her request to someone in Lindell’s circle, he said.

Peters was accused of allowing Conan Hayes, the former professional surfer who was affiliated with Lindell, to watch the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of another man who Peters had said worked for her. Prosecutors alleged that Peters’s activities amounted to identity theft — an allegation Peters disputed.

Later, in August 2021, Ron Watkins, who has ties to false election theories spread in Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere, published photos of election equipment and passwords that were quickly traced to Mesa County. Watkins is the former administrator of the 8kun message board that has been a hotbed of posts about the QAnon conspiracy theory.

A week after Watkins first posted about the equipment, copies of two Mesa County hard drives appeared online. Soon afterward, Peters said she commissioned someone to copy the hard drives to preserve their data and compare them to the hard drives after the software update.

After the material appeared online, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) successfully sued to block Peters from running elections. Peters in 2022 ran for secretary of state but lost the Republican primary. Griswold said in a statement Monday night that Peters “will now face the consequences of her actions.”

“Today’s verdict sends a clear message: we will not tolerate any effort to threaten the security of our gold standard elections,” she said.

The Colorado County Clerks Association said in a statement that clerks around the state were pleased with the verdict.

“We take seriously our role as guardians of the best election process in the nation and are grateful to see the justice system hold those who would harm our elections accountable,” executive director Matt Crane said in a statement.

Despite the charges, Peters has not stopped promoting baseless information. Ahead of the trial, Peters appeared on the Conservative Daily podcast and claimed without evidence that someone was able to inflate the voting rolls and cast ballots in the names of others. She blamed “the deep state” for her divorce and called for ending the use of voting machines.

“They’re coming after me because I exposed this,” she said on the podcast in June. “The deep state all the way up to [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, they want to put me in prison to send a chilling effect to everyone out there that speaks out about elections, that speaks out about elections that they will not question anymore. Just like what they did with the January 6 hostages.”

She used the appearance to promote jury nullification — the practice of juries acquitting someone who they believe broke the law. “There’s some really good people out there talking about jury nullification,” she said.

She added: “When the jury walks in, the judge and the gallery rises because they are the law. If a law is unrighteous, they can actually rule against it in favor of the defendant.”

Before she was elected the Mesa County clerk, Peters ran a family construction company and for a time sold magnets and other wellness products through a multilevel marketing company. Early in her tenure, her office failed to collect 574 ballots that had been left in a drop box for a November 2019 election. An effort to recall her failed.

A New York judge ruled Monday that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not appear on the state’s ballot in November after he falsely claimed that he lived at a friend’s house in New York on his qualifying petitions.

While Kennedy had claimed he lived in a spare bedroom of his friend’s Katonah, N.Y. home, he had stayed only one night in the home last month after a lawsuit was filed against him disputing that he lived there, Albany County Supreme Court Justice Christina Ryba wrote in her decision.

The ruling comes after the Democratic-aligned Clear Choice super PAC challenged Kennedy’s application for ballot access in New York and other states over alleged inaccuracies in his paperwork.

The decision, if upheld, marks Kennedy’s first loss in his effort to appear on state ballots, and it could be a warning sign for his other state petitions as his campaign listed the same address in all of his election filings nationwide.

In a statement, Kennedy decried the decision as anti-democratic. “The Democrats are showing contempt for democracy,” he said. “They aren’t confident they can win at the ballot box, so they are trying to stop voters from having a choice. We will appeal and we will win.”

Clear Choice and the Democratic National Committee celebrated the decision Monday, noting inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Kennedy’s statements during his testimony.

“Today’s ruling makes clear that Mr. Kennedy lied about his residency and provided a false address on his filing papers and candidate petitions in New York, intentionally misleading election officials and betraying voters’ trust,” the PAC said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Democrats lost a separate case in North Carolina on Monday in which they claimed that Kennedy’s political party should not receive ballot access as it was a vehicle for Kennedy to avoid strict ballot requirements imposed on independent candidates.