Sydney Sweeney registered as a Republican voter in Florida a few months before Donald Trump won a second US presidency, it has been revealed, as the public continues fixating on a new jeans ad campaign featuring the actor and a pun about her genes.
The Euphoria and White Lotus star registered to vote in Florida on 14 June 2024 – shortly after buying a mansion in the Keys – and listed her party affiliation as Republican, according to publicly available records reviewed by the Guardian on Sunday. That was about two weeks after Trump, another registered Republican Florida voter, was convicted in New York City of criminal falsification of business records and before he secured a return to the White House in November’s presidential election.
It was also about two years after Sweeney, 27, faced criticism from some US media consumers after she was photographed at her mother’s birthday party where several of the guests were seen wearing hats that called to mind those which bear Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) slogan. The native of Spokane, Washington, subsequently issued a statement on social media pleading with the public to “stop making assumptions”.
“An innocent celebration … has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention,” Sweeney’s statement added at the time.
Sweeney has not addressed her Florida Republican voter registration, the existence of which went viral on social media on Saturday and was later reported on by traditional news outlets.
The actor by then had generated considerable media coverage after the outfitter American Eagle released several videos showing her modeling the company’s denim jeans and jackets. American Eagle’s campaign generally revolves around the punny use of the phrase, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.”
In one video, “genes” is crossed out and replaced with “jeans”. Another clip showed the blue-eyed blond suggestively looking at the camera and discussing how her body’s composition “is determined by … genes”.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney continues in the advertisements, which include a joke about the cameraperson becoming distracted by her breasts.
Some social media users dismissed the campaign as tone deaf, arguing that it echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics and white supremacy at a time when the Trump administration was seeking to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as aggressively pushing to detain and deport immigrants en masse.
One TikTok reaction video that received hundreds of thousands of likes accused Sweeney of ignoring the political climate of the moment, saying “it’s literally giving … Nazi propaganda”.
US conservatives have seized on the indignation over the campaign on the liberal fringes, rushing to praise Sweeney for landing a blow on “woke” advertising, invoking a term some use to criticize DEI measures.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on social media that criticizing Sweeney’s collaboration with American Eagle was “cancel culture run amok”.
Nonetheless, many have judged backlash to Sweeney and American Eagle’s collaboration as exaggerated and overblown.
American Eagle’s stock has reportedly risen in the wake of its Sweeney-centered campaign. A statement from the company on Friday defended the campaign, saying: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.”
That outcome cut a stark contrast with the 2023 Bud Light advertisement involving trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. A conservative-organized boycott against Bud Light substantially drove sales down. The brand lost its place as the US beer market’s top seller. And Bud Light’s owner, Anheuser-Busch, sought to distance itself from Mulvaney in a statement which blamed the promotion on an “outside agency without … management awareness or approval”.
“No one was trying to cancel Sydney Sweeney,” said a post on the X account Wu Tang is for the Children, which counts on more than 270,000 followers. “And no one cares if she’s Republican or not.”
