Jayda Cheaves is speaking out after being called out for her voting history, admitting she mixed up Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as she explains why she’s encouraging her followers to take the 2026 midterm elections seriously.
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The influencer, also known as Jayda Wayda, found herself at the center of an online debate after a video surfaced in which she claimed she hadn’t voted since Barack Obama. Social media users quickly questioned that timeline because Jayda would have been too young to vote during either of Obama’s presidential elections.
Now, Jayda Cheaves is addressing the confusion directly and making it clear that she isn’t interested in letting the controversy overshadow her message about voting.
“And I’ve been seeing all the discourse around my voting journey,” she began in a new video. “I just wanna make a couple of things clear.”
Jayda acknowledged that she made a mistake when discussing her previous voting experience.
“Yeah, I stumbled on my words when I said Obama,” she explained.
She then clarified that the presidential election she was remembering was actually the 2016 race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
“If you could look up 2016, who was running, it was Hillary Clinton versus Trump,” Jayda said.
She explained that the election stood out in her memory because of the possibility that the country could elect its first woman president shortly after electing its first Black president.
“I just remember it being very monumental because they were saying we just had a black president; we might have a chance at having a female president for the first time in history.”
Jayda continued, “I just, it was two big moments, whatever that’s, neither here nor there.”
The clarification addresses the age discrepancy that sparked the original controversy. Jayda Cheaves was born on September 25, 1997, making her 11 years old when Obama was first elected president in 2008 and 15 when he won reelection in 2012.
However, she would have been 19 during the November 2016 presidential election, making her legally old enough to vote.
While her explanation establishes that she was eligible to vote during the Clinton and Trump election, it does not independently confirm whether she actually cast a ballot that year. Jayda did not provide voting records in the supplied video.
Her response also included new information about the steps she says she’s taken to participate in the upcoming midterm elections.
“What I need y’all to focus on is the fact that voting should be taken seriously,” she told her followers. “It should not be taken lightly.”
Jayda revealed that she updated her voter registration months ago after previously being registered in Savannah, Georgia, where she grew up.
“That’s why months ago I re-registered in Atlanta, Georgia, because I was registered in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m from,” she explained while discussing the upcoming midterms.
Georgia allows registered voters to update their information when they relocate. The state also requires voters to maintain accurate registration information tied to their county of residence.
Jayda says she made the change specifically because she wanted to participate in this year’s congressional elections.
She also had a message for people continuing to criticize her original statement.
“Because I know that our vote matters,” she said before sharply telling people to leave her comments alone.
The influencer explained that her original video was intended to be a vulnerable conversation about her changing relationship with politics, not an opportunity for people to pick apart every word she used.
“I got on here to be vulnerable with y’all to let y’all know that yeah, I might have took all these other years lightly, but look at the state of the world that we’re in today,” she said.
Her frustration comes after her first video sparked questions about how someone born in 1997 could have voted during the Obama era.
In that original clip, Jayda declared, “To be fair, cause I’m not no fake [expletive] [expletive], I have not voted since Barack Obama.”
She also explained that she was making an effort to become more involved in congressional elections.
“I made it my business this year to vote, Congress, just because I know that our vote actually does matter,” she said.
The initial video included Jayda discussing her previous uncertainty about presidential elections and the Electoral College system. She also credited a conversation with her grandmother for encouraging her to take voting more seriously.
Her grandmother, according to Jayda’s earlier remarks, urged her not to overlook the upcoming election. That conversation prompted her to research issues affecting the country and reconsider her previous decision to sit out elections.
Jayda also previously admitted that she didn’t vote during Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign because she had convinced herself the country wouldn’t elect a Black woman as president.
She later questioned whether that assumption had been the right reason to stay home.
Now, with the November 3 midterm elections approaching, Jayda is attempting to redirect the conversation toward the importance she places on political participation.
The elections will determine all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, regularly scheduled Senate races, and numerous state and local offices.
