While polls show that presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris remain tied in crucial swing states, they are dedicating some of their key last media campaigning moments to podcasts. How much influence do these shows have?
Following months of speculation, the news around Donald Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast sent shockwaves across the media industry.
With the US election only days away, Kamala Harris turned down her invitation, instead choosing to be interviewed on Club Shay Shay, a podcast hosted by three-time Super Bowl champion Shannon Sharpe.
With a tight race and the clock ticking, why are the US presidential candidates choosing to spend their last campaigning moments with podcasters?
And what influence do podcasts hosted by the likes of Rogan — a former stand-up comedian — really have on the US election race?
A cushy podcast setting
“Over the last ten years, we’ve seen a worldwide shift, where politicians have gone from being prepared to be interrogated and asked really difficult questions to much more informal ways of accessing audiences,” Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism told Euronews.
In past races, presidential candidates would never skip interviews on programmes like 60 Minutes, US public broadcaster CBS’ flagship interview programme. Now, both candidates have been criticised for avoiding sit-down media interviews.
In podcasts they find a far more cushy interview setting: “There’s a kind of ego thing if you’re invited onto a podcast, it’s a comfort. For politicians it’s less risky because it’s a much more friendly chat,” Newman said.
While legacy media can’t afford to rely on a journalist’s charisma or charm for a presidential interview, many podcast hosts take pride in pursuing a casual interview approach. They may be brave enough to ask candidates some of the big questions, but when it comes to pushback, it is often limited.
“For listeners, podcasts humanise politics in a way that is identifiable to people and that engages them in a different way. Politicians can be seen in a different light to how they’re often portrayed in the news, which is often in a controversial argument or a ten second soundbite”, commented Newman.
Which voters are candidates looking to appeal to?
While US presidential candidates have long relied on celebrity endorsements — Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris provoking a surge in voter registration — podcasts are a new way of appealing to young people.
The intersection of Gen Zers and Millenials is the main demographic listening to podcasts, as they are more likely to be “undecided voters, who are less likely to go out and vote”, Melissa Kiesche, senior vice president at Edison Research, told Euronews.
“55% of 18 to 34-year-olds don’t identify with either the Democratic or Republican party. And then 38% of that same group consider themselves to be independents”, she added, citing Edison’s Infinite Dial report.
Age may play a factor, but Harris and Trump have also been looking to appeal to subsets of this wider group, whittling down to factors of race, gender and social class.
“In the mass broadcasting age, election interviews were about talking to as many people as possible, whereas now it’s about talking to a niche, very specific audience,” said Newman.
Kamala Harris: From female to black vote
Kamala Harris made headlines when she appeared on Call Her Daddy, Spotify’s second-biggest podcast after the Joe Rogan Experience.
The podcast’s host, Alex Cooper, did not begin her interview by pressing Harris on hard political matters. However, as the conversation went on, the vice president moved on to stress the importance of women’s health rights and access to abortion.
Many of the shows on which both Harris and Trump have appeared are not political podcasts. The hosts often have prior careers in the entertainment and sports industries. These hosts don’t usually talk about politics, and many fear that this will cost them their usual listener base.
Thirty-year-old Cooper, who launched her podcast shortly after graduating from university, apologised to her fans for bringing politics onto her show. “I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in,” she stated.
Harris was also interviewed on All That Smoke, hosted by former basketball players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson — an appearance where she was believed to be courting the young black male vote, speaking about her racial identity as well as her support for legalising marijuana.
Despite rumours about her being featured as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience, Kamala Harris’ campaign team stated she wouldn’t appear on the show due to “scheduling” issues at “this period of the campaign”.
Trump’s choices: A male audience
In his three-hour interview on Rogan’s podcast, Trump came clean about which staff members he regretted appointing, his conversations with Kim Jong-un about taking “it easy” on nuclear weapons, as well as his view that Putin “would have never gone in” to Ukraine had he remained in office.
“On an average week, the programme reaches around 19.5 million Americans aged over 13 years old across all platforms,” Kiesche said.
The two have not always seen eye to eye, with Rogan calling Trump “an existential threat to democracy” in 2022. However, the two are also friends of Elon Musk and the UFC CEO Dana White, a close ally of Trump’s. They chatted about these shared interests in the podcast.
According to Edison’s research, 80% of the Joe Rogan Experience listeners are men. Their political affiliations are less clear-cut, with 35% identifying as independent voters, 32% as Republicans, and 27% as Democrats.
Trump has appeared on podcasts with a young male audience and male hosts, which is believed to be an attempt to capture this demographic of voters.
“The vast majority of political podcasters or influencer are men in the US, but also in most other countries. They speak into these very large microphones to guests who are also often men,” said Newman.
Other shows in which Trump has appeared include Bussin’ with the Boys, hosted by NFL Players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, as well as the Impaulsive with Logan Paul podcast run by the former professional wrestler.
Although Trump spoke about matters relating to politics on these other shows, nowhere did he dig as deep as he did on Rogan’s show.
Russian-bought podcast influence
Although podcasts may appeal to listeners through their cosy, homemade nature, the most successful ones are no longer a one-man band and are instead often backed by podcast production companies. What lies behind these production companies can sometimes hide more sinister ties.
In a recent case, US prosecutors alleged that six major right-wing influencers worked unknowingly for a media company that served as a front for a Russian influence operation.
Among these influencers was Tim Pool, a journalist-turned-YouTuber who interviewed Donald Trump on his podcast earlier this year.
The company is believed to have secretly funded influencers to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition” to Russian interests. This included peddling a specific narrative around Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
The US Justice Department doesn’t allege any wrongdoing on behalf of the influencers but accuses two employees of RT, a Russian state media company banned across the EU, of feeding nearly $10 million (€9.25m) into a Tennessee-based content creation company.
So… Is it really the podcast election?
Many hit-sensation podcasts are now also broadcast on video platforms, and the days of podcasts being purely a recorded audio format are long gone.
Podcast clips can be reshared hundreds of thousands — or even millions of times — on social media as well as traditional legacy media.
“YouTube is highly influential as many young people use it as a search engine. Instead of going to Google, they go to YouTube to find whatever content they might want to find or whatever information they might want to learn about. This is where they find podcast video clips”, said Kiesche.
The algorithm used on podcast distribution platforms like Spotify and Apple also plays a hand in driving specific kinds of content up.
“Genre is a funny thing because the producer themselves defines their genre, at least within the Apple ecosystem,” she explained.
“In some cases, it can be a case of manipulating the system, there are some political podcasts that are actually tagged as education podcasts because they will probably rank higher by doing that.”
“On Spotify and Apple, it’s not just the number of people listening which influences recommendations but also the number of people searching for a podcast or downloading it,” Kiesche added.
“People are calling it the podcast election, but in reality, we mustn’t forget that there are so many ways in which people get information from,” assessed Newman.
“Social media and politicians’ influence on TikTok is arguably more influential than podcasts,” he concluded.
