Taylor Swift has renounced her long-held political neutrality and waded into the US midterm elections, urging her 112 million Instagram followers to vote for Democrats in her home state of Tennessee, and enraging alt-right sympathisers who saw her as their poster girl.

An analyst on Good Morning America, a leading breakfast show, mused over what “a weaponised Taylor Swift will look like”, while alt-right chat boards exploded in disgust at her announcement.

“She was supposed to be our girl! Why did she break our hearts?” wrote one person on the 4Chan forum, while another added: “They took her from us”.

The 28-year-old, who moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville to pursue her musical career aged 14, rose to fame as a country music star and, in a bid to avoid alienating fans, has vehemently avoided the subject of politics.

But on Sunday night she broke her silence and announced her support for the Democrat candidates in her state.

“In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now,” she wrote.