With support from Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Panic! At The Disco, David Byrne, Anderson .Paak, Tinashe, Paramore and more, HeadCount has registered more than 150,000 voters already this year.
“We’re joined at the hip with the music industry,” says executive director Andrew Bernstein, pointing to board members including Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, Brooklyn Bowl’s Peter Shapiro, Superfly’s Richard Goodstone, Red Light Management’s Patrick Jordan, AEG’s Don Strasburg and others, as well as new director of artist relations Lisa DeLuca, formerly of Epic Records.
“In 2020 half of all young people in the U.S. voted — that’s a record in modern history,” he says. “But the overwhelming majority are not voting in midterms, so there’s a tremendous upside here: A lot of people who think they’re registered find out they’re actually not, and this offers them the opportunity.”
He also says that the beliefs of many of the artists who support HeadCount can creat the impression that it’s a liberal organization. “We work with a lot of artists with strong political views and who are passionate about them, which is good,” he says. “We are sometimes expected to lean a certain way and make a stand — but that’s not what we do.”
That artist support can take a number of different forms, from a video shown before Harry Styles concerts to David Byrne giving a long speech about voting rights during his recent “American Utopia” Broadway show. While Styles’ audiences would seem to include thousands of potentially unregistered voters, wouldn’t Byrne largely be preaching to the converted?