Whither the podcast election?
If 2024 was a “podcast election,” what’s 2026 shaping up to be?
One pithy phrase probably won’t capture all the complexities of the midterm election media environment. Every state is unique, and every race is different.
But the tonal shift from 2024 is really striking. President Trump’s re-election brought story after story about the stupendous influence of Joe Rogan, Theo Von, et al. “The political power of podcasting is only beginning to be felt,” Scott Galloway wrote in a post-election column about the “manosphere.”
The stories weren’t wrong, but those 2024 power players have receded into the background, politically speaking. Rogan has turned into a Trump skeptic, frequently expressing criticism of ICE and the war in Iran. Moreover, Rogan is not using his show to promote vulnerable Republican candidates. (His flattering 2025 interview with James Talarico is still being passed around, though.)
Other right-leaning podcasters who were outspoken in 2024 are also much more muted this time — reflecting disappointment with Trump and a general malaise about the GOP’s midterm chances.
There’s a lot more energy among left-leaning podcasters, though there hasn’t been a single breakout podcast moment this election cycle, a la Trump’s appearance on Rogan’s show in 2024.
“Candidates running statewide are going to have different attention strategies than presidential candidates,” Dan Pfeiffer, who co-hosts “Pod Save America,” pointed out to me. Plus, “your target voters in the midterms have different news diets than those in a presidential.”
Still, most of the Democratic Senate candidates in battleground states have visited “Pod Save America” this year, some on multiple occasions. Gubernatorial candidates have been frequent guests, too.
Some candidates are leaning into the intimate, in-depth format of podcasting more than others. Abdul El-Sayed, for instance, has been on “Pod Save,” “The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart,” and “The Ezra Klein Show” in the past month. El-Sayed’s Republican rival Mike Rogers, on the other hand, has mostly stuck to local media and national TV.
On his podcast, Klein observed that attention and candidate performance seem to be “uncorrelated” right now: “There is almost no connection between who the candidates are who are everywhere, on social media and my feeds, and who are the candidates who are doing particularly well or poorly, at least in polls.”
One week from now, we’ll be much better able to assess which candidates had winning media strategies and which did not.
But it seems that podcasts, once a novel and conversational way to reach voters, have been absorbed into the same blob that all media exists in.
Most big podcasts now exist as audio and video; on Apple Podcasts and YouTube. And many other interview formats (like cable news talk shows) now get reformatted as podcasts too. A candidate sit-down might start as a podcast interview, but by the time someone sees a clip on Instagram, it’s just another piece of talking-head content.