When Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White made a speech at Trump’s victory party this week, he closed on a note of gratitude: “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.”
White was right to thank this coterie of content creators. Trump had recently appeared alongside all of them, delivering an unfiltered dose of his worldview to their massive, largely male audiences. The message appears to have landed. While it will take much more time and data to truly understand how the U.S. arrived at this electoral outcome, what seems undeniable already is that podcasts played a substantial role in bringing it about.
Over the past decade, right-wing influencers have come to dominate the podcasting space—and now those podcasts have helped determine a presidential election.
Where we are
Looking at the Spotify charts as of this writing, the top 15 podcasts are populated by Fox News stars past (Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino), not to mention far-right firebrand Candace Owens, former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, and, perched at the very top, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan, who has nearly 15 million Spotify subscribers plus more than 18 million on YouTube. The cumulative sway of all these popular personalities fired up existing Trump supporters and brought new ones into the tent, even before Team Trump explicitly made right-wing podcasts crucial to the candidate’s outreach strategy.
In 2020, Trump appearing on Rogan’s podcast would have been a notable shift in norms—like if Barack Obama had gone on WTF with Marc Maron while running for his second term in 2012, rather than three years later. Bernie Sanders incurred some backlash during primary season that year, just for touting Rogan’s support. By the time Trump stopped by Rogan’s studio in late October, however, the visit was practically inevitable. It was the final killer pellet in a shotgun-blast of media hits across the corridor of Gen Z-courting, right-leaning podcasts.
Trump’s team homed in on these shows because they reach the vast audiences of younger men the candidate hoped to capture. Meanwhile, the podcasters were more than receptive to the offer—with the Nelk Boys helping launch the $20 million Send The Vote PAC to assist Trump with winning. This marriage between candidate and medium, at a time when America’s trust in traditional media had fallen to a historic low, has led many observers to label 2024’s presidential contest “the podcast election.”
This was the podcast election
— Bobby Goodlatte (@rsg) November 6, 2024
Every time media shifts, politics changes
Nixon v Kennedy: Television defined the election
Trump v Kamala:: Podcasts
She should have gone on Rogan. It might not have tipped it, but you have to play the game on the field
The age of 'the first social media election' is finally over (it's been 4 elections now…).
— Jamie Bartlett (@JamieJBartlett) November 6, 2024
The age of 'the first podcast election' is upon us!
The fact that the winning candidate had a large hand in vilifying and delegitimizing traditional media over the past decade, boosting podcasts immeasurably, only makes that diagnosis even more accurate.
How we got here
How did the right end up annexing so much of the Wild West of audio broadcasting? For starters, they had a built-in advantage: podcasting’s predecessor, talk radio, was already ruled by conservative superstars including the late Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage. Even the most high-profile attempt to create a liberal-leaning talk radio powerhouse—the 2004 launch of Air America, featuring a pre-Senate Al Franken, a pre-MSNBC Rachel Maddow, and a pre-WTF Marc Maron—quickly fizzled out, before quietly going off the air forever six years later.
Once the podcast boom began in the 2010s, with practically every comedian converting their home office into a recording studio, and shows like Serial becoming cultural events, conservative outlets from Fox News to Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire began establishing a presence in that realm. After the crushing blow of the 2016 election, a group of former Obama staffers including Jon Favreau launched their signature podcast, Pod Save America, on their burgeoning network, Crooked Media. Their goal was to achieve what Air America never could: build out a liberal answer to talk radio in the podcast space.
Within a few years, though, the right had terraformed that space for their own audiences.
It wasn’t just Limbaugh Lovers and Hannity Heads transitioning into podcasts, either. A generation weaned on Rogan’s long-running show soon spawned a galaxy of similar programs for listeners to glom onto. They weren’t all explicitly conservative like the Daily Wire’s many offerings. Instead, this new crew of Barstool conservatives merged goofy banter about sports, pop culture, and hot ladies, with social grievances and MAGA-friendly topical takes.
At the same time, comedians in the same orbit as Shane Gillis, famously fired from SNL for making crude racial jokes on his podcast, began to align with Trumpian politics, whether they were trying to or not. Gillis’s cancellation in 2019 made him a free-speech martyr and a lightning rod for the conservative cause. He and fellow comic podcasters such as Theo Von and Andrew Schulz soon attracted legions of disaffected young men. Their shows weren’t often explicitly political, but they were always sympathetic to and welcoming of anyone who felt oppressed by the idea that liberalism is definitively the correct way to move through the world.
Adding to the feel of listening to forbidden scrolls, as Taylor Lorenz writes in User Mag, “[W]hen right wing creators began getting deplatformed more frequently on mainstream social media apps in the second half of the 2010s, an entire ecosystem of alternative platforms aimed at helping extremist influencers monetize and amass audiences, cropped up.” One of the more popular alternative platforms is Rumble, which is backed by Peter Thiel, as Lorenz notes, and hosts far-right stars Bongino, Steven Crowder, and Tim Pool.
All of these developments made way for podcasts like the Nelk Boys’s Full Send, which began in 2021 and contains elements of all of the above, holding mass appeal for younger men who feel overtaxed by the #MeToo movement, along with the Gen Z MAGA faithful. In a highly stratified cultural landscape, these shows exploded in popularity without attracting mainstream attention. The other side either didn’t see them coming, or dismissed them as insignificant.
What happens now
It’s easy for outside audiences to misunderstand Joe Rogan’s podcast. Reading just the tweets about Trump’s appearance on the show made it seem like a disaster for the candidate, with Rogan having to rein him in from incoherent ramblings. But those context-free snippets ignore the bigger picture. The two had a friendly conversation for three hours, with Trump coming across more relaxed and off-the-cuff than he did on the stump. It sounded like a mutual admiration society because it probably was. After all, these are two incredibly popular public figures, both of whom traditional media often informs young men they’re not supposed to like.
With their tremendous power and influence, these two share the paradoxical status of unbeatable underdogs. Kamala Harris couldn’t find an equivalent summit in her visits to megawatt podcasts Call Her Daddy and All the Smoke, because one does not exist. She certainly wouldn’t have found it by going on Rogan’s podcast, although she should have gone on anyway. (The reason Harris never went on the show appears to be that Rogan bigfooted her, demanding she do the record at his studio and not limit it to an hour.)
While Harris’s appearance on SNL the Saturday before the election has since been viewed on YouTube 10 million times, Rogan’s episodes with Trump, JD Vance, and top Trump ally Elon Musk in the week before the election earned a combined 73 million views on YouTube. Not to mention that each of those episodes ran for multiple hours and produced many shorter clips that had their own viral trajectories. In the new economy of influence, these clips possibly helped persuade or fire up more voters than that highly coveted Taylor Swift endorsement.
If liberals ever hope to compete with such a successful messaging apparatus, they’re going to have to do more than create clones of Crooked Media. They will have to elevate, or build from the ground up, captivating public figures who connect with vast audiences including, but not limited to, disaffected young men—and entertain the hell out of them. Politics should be baked into the dish, obviously, but it can’t comprise the entire recipe.
“I want to just address the elephant in the room here,” Crooked Media cofounder Dan Pfeiffer said midway through the first post-election episode of Pod Save America on Wednesday. “The entire goal of this company after 2016 was to encourage people to get more engaged in politics and run for office and knock on doors, and after a result like last night, it’s easy to feel like: Did any of that matter?”
One of the conclusions he arrives at is that Democrats in the last three elections have been struggling to reach less politically engaged voters. (“People hate politics right now,” he says, “and we sound like politicians.”) Perhaps the next phase of the struggle will involve accepting that the assumption of Democrats as the default standard-bearer for decent people is now a false premise. For better or worse in the eye of the beholder, MAGA is no longer the scary fringe, but the mainstream. In order for Democrats to make a real dent in the podcast space—and in the hearts of voters—they will have to become more than just the #resistance once again. They need to become a compelling opposition party, one that feels both like opposition and a party.
Correction, November 7, 2024: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Dan Bongino as a current employee of Fox News. He left in 2023.