Kylie Jenner's Bikini Photo Boosted Traffic to Vote.org by 1500%
TMZ - Kylie Jenner is flexing her political influence in a very impressive way ... turning your standard IG thirst trap into nearly 50,000 potential new registered voters!
TMZ's learned Kylie's smoke show bikini pics -- posted Monday -- are drawing huge traffic for Vote.org. She used the caption of those sexy shots to direct her nearly 200 million Instagram followers to hit up the site, and so many obeyed ... we're told it saw a whopping 1500% boost from traffic driven via Instagram.
There are more astronomical stats -- Vote.org got over an 80% increase in total users of its voter registration and verification tool from the prior day. That all translates to more than 48,000 users going to the site through Kylie's IG post ... and ya gotta figure that number's still rising.
By contrast ... only 2,900 users came to the registration verification tool via Instagram on Sunday out of 174k total users. So, there's clearly a very real Kylie effect working here.
I'm going to bend a personal rule I have about never creating any Kardashian adjacent content. Because this is a moment where there's a larger issue at play here, so it becomes more of a guideline than an unbreakable rule.
First, a brief timeline of voting rights in the United States:
- 1789: Only landowning adult white males are allowed to vote. Washington is elected President by 6% of the population
- 1870: The 15th Amendment prevents states from restricting voting based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude".
- 1920: The 19th Amendment extends voting rights to women.
- 1924: The Indian Citizenship Act gives voting rights to Native Americans
- 1971: The 26th Amendment lowers the voting age to 18, granted a say to those serving their country in Vietnam.
- 2020: A 23-year-old billionaire socialite grants the vote to 50,000 followers while sitting on an expensive piece of patio furniture in a designer bathing suit.
You can question the wisdom of people so disengaged from representative democracy that they need to be told to register by a fashionista modeling her exquisitely waxed armpit all you want. But you can't deny the influence of the influencer here. This is a demonstration of the power of the Thirst Trap. (And please note I'm using that term as ironic patois, not actually talking that way.) As well as the perfect example of the Age of Celebrity in which we live.
I'm sure the Founders never saw this coming, but I think they allowed for it the moment they wrote the Constitution in such a way that it could be changed. They baked it right into the pie, so to speak, that down the road citizens would want others to have the vote and gave them the means to grant that power. That it eventually might lead to a world where we get registered to vote by a vapid yet wildly successful model on a website designed for PG celebrity photos, "The Office" memes and pictures of sorority girls making heart hands around the sunset, probably never occurred to them. But I doubt they'd have objected. You look at what colossal hordogs guys like Franklin and Jefferson were and you just know they'd have been following Kyrie Jenner on the Gram if the technology came out 250 years before it did.
So congrats to her. The same people who get influenced to buy whatever footwear she's got on, what she smears on her lips or whatever fragrance she claims to smell like are being influenced to exercise the fundamental right people have been fighting for since we founded this godforsaken republic. And I suppose that's a good thing. Behold the person who's going to have the greatest impact on the most important election of our lifetimes. You have to respect the hell out of her for it.
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