FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA (The Washington Post) - Miley Cyrus - the celebrity wrecking ball, twerking machine, chart topper, Instagrammer, and former Bernie Sanders supporter - added a new move to her repertoire Saturday (Oct 22): door-knocker for Hillary Clinton.
"Hello? How are you?! I'm Miley," Cyrus said after knocking on the George Mason University dorm room door of Jake Zartman, 18, a freshman from Ohio. The 23-year-old pop star, now a coach on The Voice, was dressed in a glittery red and silver dress with a blue furry jacket, a blue bow tie covering her chest and a pink head band. The young man was practically quaking.
"I'm here supporting Hillary. Are you going to vote?" asked Cyrus. "You'll be proud to know I've already voted for Hillary," Mr Zartman told her. "Yeah!" she yelped. "Obviously," Mr Zartman said.
And so it went on Saturday afternoon at George Mason in the swing state of Virginia, where a lucky number of students in the Piedmont dorm got to wait in their pizza box-laden rooms waiting for Cyrus to enter and chat them up, even pose for selfies on their junky twin beds. They were smiling and sticking their tongues out in trademark Cyrus style.
Hundreds of George Mason students not lucky to live in Piedmont had to wait outside, where they chanted "We want Miley! We want Miley!" and sang her songs.
She eventually blew them kisses from a dorm window, hoisting a "Stronger Together" poster and prompting shouts below of "Twerk for us! Twerk!" With less than three weeks until the election, the Clinton campaign has deployed Cyrus, Katy Perry and other celebrities to boost turnout for the Democratic ticket.
Cyrus's endorsement of Clinton comes after some very public embraces of Sanders. Just last month, Cyrus told Elle magazine that she was going to tell contestants the following advice: "Be Bernie Sanders. Be the person people want and love. Don't worry about the masses. That's how you make a memorable moment. Let people talk about it."
And six months ago, she participated in a celebrity video pushing Sanders as the Democratic nominee over Clinton. In the April video, in which she appears alongside the likes of Susan Sarandon and Harry Belafonte, she said the Vermont senator "has been a bad ass in supporting the LGBT community". She advertised the clip on her Twitter account, saying, "I feel the bern @Bernie Sanders and @SusanSarandon."
Regardless of whether she's been riding the Clinton train the whole time or not, one thing is clear: the musician is not a fan of Donald Trump. In early 2016, she launched into an Instagram tirade against the eventual Republican nominee, blasting him as a "(expletive) nightmare" and vowed to leave the country if he won the White House.
Though the sight of the provocateur knocking on doors for Clinton might seem more like a stunt, Cyrus, the daughter of country star Billy Ray Cyrus, actually has politics in her blood. Her paternal grandfather was the late Ronald Ray Cyrus, a Democratic member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, who was elected to 11 straight terms from the 1970s through the 1990s. (In 2007, Cyrus released a song in his honour called, I Miss You.) She's also donated to multiple charities and participated in events to raise money for Aids victims, crises in Haiti and Japan, and organisations such as Habitat for Humanity.
Cyrus also has some history with Clinton, too. In 2013, she impersonated her on Saturday Night Live. In the skit, Cyrus as Clinton walks into the Oval Office clad in a pantsuit and says, "What up y'all! I'm like Hillary Clinton and I wanna be President one day to help, like, gay people, and black people and, like Asians and little people..." This being Cyrus, she, of course, then flashed open her blazer to show only a bra covering her breasts that said in large font: 2016.
