Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McRae & Brandi Carlile Help HeadCount Celebrate Its Biggest ‘Off Year’ Yet

No matter your political affiliation, the Nov. 4 elections can be seen as a win for democracy, with multiple cities and states recording their highest voter turnouts in years including New York City’s biggest turnout since 1969. Nonprofit, nonpartisan organization HeadCount has helped drive youth civic engagement this past election cycle thanks to partnerships with artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McRae and Brandi Carlile.

Since being co-founded in 2004 by The Disco Biscuits bass player Marc Brownstein, HeadCount has spent the past two decades fulfilling its mission “to use the power of music and popular culture to register voters and promote participation in democracy” – signing up over 1.7 million voters with nonpartisan voter registration drives held at more than 1,000 live events annually. 

HeadCount is celebrating its biggest “off year” with 39,600 voters registered as of Nov. 6 – up 600% from the last “off year” after a presidential election. The organization’s 2025 impact includes 1,096 field events including festivals, concerts and community events registering voters and 766,802 total voter actions including checking registration status, updating info, and signing up for local election alerts.

The nonprofit works with a range of artists year to year, depending on touring schedules, with about 60 this year and over 100 in 2024. Lucille Wenegieme, HeadCount’s Executive Director, noted that the organization is especially proud of working with artists from a range of genres. After getting its start in the jam band community, Headcount’s artist partners represent pop, rock, R&B, folk, country, K-pop, hip-hop and Latin, among other genres.

Carpenter’s ongoing partnership with HeadCount included a “Good to Vote” digital campaign that launched on National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 16, in which fans could enter a sweepstakes to win VIP tickets, flights, and hotel accommodations to Carpenter’s Nov. 23 show at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena by checking their voter registration status or signing up to get election info.

HeadCount was featured at 15 stops on Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet Tour” including pre-show video content and hosting information booths to register fans to vote. Last year Carpenter was HeadCount’s top artist partner, helping generate more than 35,000 registrations and over 263,000 civic actions.

Other HeadCount highlights over the past year include helping host Participation Row at Dead & Company’s 60th anniversary shows in San Francisco, bringing together a number of nonprofits and registering 5,300 voters, as well as being the voter registration partner for Chappell Roan’s pop-up shows across the U.S. The biggest festivals driving voter action in 2025 include All Things Go, Electric Forest, and Outside Lands.

HeadCount has also expanded its partners outside of music, across the entertainment industry, including Olympic athletes, actors, content creators and gamers. 

Pollstar caught up with Wenegieme a few days after this month’s election to get her takeaways as HeadCount was about to welcome its 100,000th volunteer. 

“When folks check their voter registration status or they get registered hopefully they go on to vote with the information that we give them but then a lot of folks then volunteer and help other people vote too because they have this really great interaction with us,” Wenegieme said. “We’re about to cross our 100,000th volunteer, which is really exciting. It really is a virtuous circle.”

Pollstar: HeadCount is nonpartisan, so that being said, without getting into politics, what are your biggest takeaways from the Nov. 4 election?
Lucille Wenegieme: I think two things really come to the forefront for me. The first is definitely community. That was definitely the name of the game, particularly for young voters, music fans. The campaigns and the races and the initiatives that felt like they had a real community component were definitely the ones that we saw shine. After the pandemic and just in general, we are talking to generations of folks that really want to connect, which for us is usually on site at a tour or something, but definitely community. I would say the second piece is that young people really want to be engaged where they know that they can make that difference and local elections oftentimes are decided, within 10% of the vote. And so that’s really a place where we have seen that young people can really make the difference. And that can look like record turnout since 1969 in New York City or some of these much smaller elections where we’ve seen the youth vote really make a difference or young candidates really succeed.

What do you attribute to making this the biggest off year yet for HeadCount?
For us it’s definitely been our artist partners. I think in the odd years in the smaller elections and the local elections, really having those artist partners who are willing to give us the real estate on their tour locations or at festivals or even just their digital platforms is really key. I think a lot of other civic organizations, whenever there’s a national election, they sort of ramp up. But for us, we’re there all year, every year because there’s always going to be an artist partner of ours who’s touring or, you know, folks going to a festival over the summer. So I think that’s really been part of our success. And being able to pair what we do in person, which is really strong with what we also do digitally. 

Sabrina Carpenter was one of our artist partners this year and she was able to garner over 30,000 voting actions over National Voter Registration Day. And that’s through being able to amplify using her digital platform, her social media. Really being able to interact with fans both in person and online has been really huge for us.

Odd years are exciting. There were over 50,000 elections over the course of this month. Over 600 ballot measures, so we actually had some stuff to engage folks on, things to to talk with people about to make sure that they got out to vote. 

And this is an ongoing partnership with Sabrina Carpenter?
This is part of an ongoing partnership with [Carpenter] and a few other artists. This was the first local election year that we partnered with her in coordination with both her tour and digital programming. So it was really great to see that ongoing partnership which is what we really love from our artist partners. It’s really key to the way that we work – it makes it so much more authentic when it’s not just right before the election with two weeks left. It’s really an artist who’s saying this is a priority and I really want my fans to be thinking about how they’re getting engaged.

HeadCount also once again partnered with Brandi Carlile.
Brandi is another one that we’ve worked with in a few different ways. So, usually we partner with her to do fundraising. She’s a really great supporter of our work and so at times we will fundraise with her, but this fall we really wanted to activate her fans to make sure they had up-to-date voter registration. Younger fans move quite a bit, sometimes up to every 18 months on average for younger people, so making sure that that’s up to date is important. With [Carlile] we coordinated with her on the launch of her latest single called “Church and State.” We had folks check their voter registration status and they were [entered] to win [tickets] for a stop on her tour.

Any artists that recently came on board with HeadCount? 
Two folks that have joined us this year that we’re really excited about are Ravyn Lenae … and Jensen McCrae is another one. We did a great fun popup with [McCrae] for her fans in partnership with Strand Bookstore in October ahead of her sold-out show at Irving Ballroom in New York. We’re always excited when we can do kind of new fun and interesting things that feel really focused on the fans [and] that feel really authentic. … She’s a book lover, she’s a reader. … We brought a bunch of her fans [to] Strand to listen to an acoustic performance from her and to hear her talk about why civic [engagement] is important to her and to meet each other, connect with other fans ahead of her show. It was a really beautiful moment. We did a custom bookmark with her so that her fans had something to come away with. It was just a really great moment to really engage folks who already have a common interest with her as an artist and reading as a hobby and kind of thread those things in a really fun and interesting way.

What’s next for HeadCount? 
As we’re coming up to the end of this year, really thinking about the 250th anniversary of America and the midterms, there’s always a little bit more conversation about what does it mean to be civically engaged? What does it mean to show up? We’re always really grateful when our artists are outspoken and they use their platform in really supportive ways to say however it is that you vote, as long as you use your voice and that you are being active, that that’s important. And so we’re really excited to continue to ramp up as we get to the midterms and start having primaries and the general election in November. We’re excited for artists to continue to get more creative, get louder, and really authentically talk about being civically engaged.