How Podcasts Became the New Battleground State

Want to win future presidential elections? Time to bro out. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: PowerfulJRE via YouTube

This article was originally published on October 29, ahead of the 2024 election. During Donald Trump’s victory speech on November 6, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White specifically thanked podcasters Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys, and Joe Rogan.

Deep into Donald Trump’s three-hour October 25 sit-down on The Joe Rogan Experience, the Republican candidate wonders aloud if Kamala Harris would ever appear on the podcast. He’s clearly winding up to another insult aimed at his opponent, but Rogan takes the question seriously. “I could imagine her doing the show,” he replies. Trump presses on (“She’s not going to do it, it would be a mess”), to which Rogan laughs perfunctorily. “I think we’d have a fine conversation,” he says. “I wouldn’t try to interview her; I’d just have a conversation with her and hopefully get to know her as a human being. That was my goal of getting her on: to try and get her to express herself.”

You can tell Rogan means it. This is a little ironic given that he makes this appeal for authenticity sitting across from Trump, a salesman who constantly shape-shifts to play to the closest crowd that would love him back. But Rogan, who hosts what remains the biggest podcast in the world, has always preached the notion of open dialogue. While many, including myself, find some chunks of his speech and beliefs to range from questionable to abhorrent, he’s still, at heart, a talker in search of sustained conversation, which makes him a little different from the digital subculture of shitposters and far-right ideologues who are in it for the attention, the yuks, and the money. The Harris camp hasn’t yet made doing The Joe Rogan Experience a priority; maybe it should reconsider.

The case for this being the first true podcast election cycle continues to hold. After all, you can’t be a presidential candidate in 2024 without trying to reach more voters where they actually are. This doesn’t yet mean abandoning traditional media spaces like broadcast networks and newspapers — though the Washington Post’s and the Los Angeles Times’ decisions to stop making presidential endorsements, seemingly because of their billionaire owners, have certainly diminished their influence in the eyes of campaign managers and, potentially, the public. What it does mean is there’s growing value in spending time with newer-age media platforms like podcasts, Kick, Twitch, and YouTube.

It’s widely established by now that Trump, who avoids all forms of unfriendly press, has rounded out his unwavering support from the right-wing media ecosystem by wholeheartedly embracing the “manoverse.” He’s appeared on bro-casts like This Past Weekend With Theo Von, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, and the Nelk Boys’ Full Send, among others, deepening a strategy of playing into the aesthetics and grievances of what’s often described as “disaffected young men,” a demographic that makes up a considerable portion of his base. These appearances take the shape of friendly hangouts where Trump and the hosts cover topics like sports, libertarianism, free speech, dads, and conspiracy theories, a topic that connects with the former president’s vigorous deployment of baseless claims. Trump’s campaign is so happy with this approach, apparently, that it seems to have fully integrated the digital subculture to further power its appeal. That’s how we ended up with the comedian-podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe, a.k.a. the host of the podcast Kill Tony, calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.

Harris’s approach to podcasting has been similarly targeted: appealing to women through Call Her Daddy and Unlocking Us With Brené Brown as well as Black men through, most recently, Club Shay Shay, the sports and culture podcast hosted by NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe, which unexpectedly produced one of the biggest podcast episodes earlier this year when Katt Williams appeared as a guest and proceeded to burn the comedy universe down to its studs. (The Williams episode currently sports over 81 million views on YouTube.) If Trump’s podcast strategy is to deepen his core base, Harris’s looks like a move to tactically shore up different wings of her coalition.

A good deal of Big Podcasting is messy business, and in a culture supercharged by micro-celebrity and the internet, messiness is a kind of proxy for authenticity. As reflected by anything from Smartless to Call Her Daddy to any number of other reality-television podcasts, lasting episodes are ones containing moments that feel like you’re looking beyond the veil: a private revelation, the dispensing of tea, an instance of interpersonal friction, the emergence of an inside joke. This stacks the deck for Trump, a chaos agent whose primary gift is a capacity to make loud noises, redirect conversation, and keep your attention. Trump’s meandering spot on The Joe Rogan Experience saw the two men talk about anything from the UFC to whale psychiatry to the close-call assassination attempt to Trump’s income-tax policies to their grievances with the press. It’s also an appearance where Trump repeated his praise for dictators, threats against enemies, and litany of baseless lies about election interference, among many other things, most of which Rogan didn’t press him on, though he did raise light challenges when the topic turned to the environment. “But there are legitimate concerns about environmental impacts, correct?” he said, interjecting an extended Trump tirade about green consultants holding up drilling and development. “Look at the BP oil spill … There are things that happen that are environmentally devastating.” (Trump: “Sure. Sure. Of course.”)

If Trump has successfully mapped his talent for making mess onto the basic incentives of a podcast, Harris is a classical operator still working with old media tactics. On Call Her Daddy and Club Shay Shay, Harris reiterated many of the same talking points and anecdotes she’s already delivered elsewhere. Speaking to Sharpe on the subject of grief and her late mother, Harris gave the same response as she did to Anderson Cooper during her CNN Town Hall on October 23. “Grief is difficult,” she says. “There are two sides to the coin. There are relationships in your life that touch you deeply, and then to lose that person, it leaves a big void.” It’s a thoughtful answer. It’s also too rehearsed to make a lasting impression on someone who, like Rogan, is interested in off-the-cuff remarks and visceral reactions. The fine-tuned sound-biting that politicians like Harris spend their careers honing clashes with the discursive, digressive modality of popular podcasts. The things you want from a good politician — message discipline, clarity, consistency — are anathema to good conversation.

It’s not that Trump doesn’t also constantly repeat his own talking points. On The Joe Rogan Experience as on This Past Weekend, for example, he recites the same spiel about being knowledgable about nuclear power because of his late “Uncle John,” who was apparently an expert in such matters. This isn’t even to mention all the anti-democratic conspiracy theories he recites in each podcast appearance as means to preemptively discredit a potential electoral loss. Since he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, Trump has been held to a different, easier standard compared to just about anybody else who’s ever graced the national political stage. A sad but undeniable truth follows from this: Trump is always a better match to play the new rules of YouTube and podcast interviews.

Yet there would still be value for Harris and the Democrats to take on The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan isn’t going away, nor is the format of big rambling podcasts or the challenge for Democrats that Rogan represents: the legion of men for which the podcaster functions as a totem and that the party needs to eventually figure out how to communicate with. There are risks to doing The Joe Rogan Experience, too. Rogan’s fondness for conspiracy theories means that Harris would be on the back foot. She’d have to spend almost as much time debunking, defusing, or swatting away Rogan’s beliefs as she does advancing her own stories and arguments in a way that Trump never has to. There may also be costs incurred among the Democratic coalition by simply appearing on the show. Back in the 2020 cycle, Bernie Sanders went on the podcast, earned Rogan’s endorsement, and ended up incurring some backlash as a result. Still, the fact Rogan backed Sanders in the first place, and the somewhat underemphasized fact that he considered Trump “an existential threat to democracy” in 2020, illustrates a figure who isn’t unmovable or automatically antagonistic in the way, say, Fox News or Newsmax is.

One week away from Election Day, it may well be too late for the Harris campaign to even try at this point. The Trump campaign, perhaps looking to further box out its opponent, is sending J.D. Vance to tape his own episode with Rogan midweek. But after the first true podcast election, Democrats will need to figure the scene out. Last week, USA Today published a poll stating that nearly 72 percent of respondents had not seen Harris on a podcast and 77.5 percent had not seen a Trump podcast appearance, implying that only a quarter of respondents, give or take, had actually listened. This might seem like a small proportion of Americans were reached by these presidential podcast spots. But in an electoral contest where victory lies in winning the margins, it’s not insignificant — and it’s only set to grow.