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. This time around, Republicans are not campaigning on “The Joe Rogan Experience” or “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von.” And the podcasters are not really cheering them on, either.
President Trump’s re-election brought story after story about the stupendous influence of Rogan, Von, and other so-called “manosphere” hosts. “The political power of podcasting is only beginning to be felt,” Scott Galloway wrote in a post-election column.
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. “I can’t believe we went into this war,” Rogan said in April.
Moreover, Rogan is not using his show to promote Republican candidates this election cycle. His flattering 2025 interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico is still circulating, though, and he doesn’t seem like a fan of Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton.
Other right-leaning podcasters who were outspoken in 2024 are also much more muted this year — 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.
Dan Pfeiffer, who co-hosts the popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” said midterm media strategies are different because the races are different.
“Candidates running statewide are going to have different attention strategies than presidential candidates,” Pfeiffer told CNN. Plus, “your target voters in the midterms have different news diets than those in a presidential.”
That said, 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.”
Once the votes are counted, 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. 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.
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.
In Iowa, for example, both the Republican Senate candidate, Ashley Hinson, and the Democrat, Josh Turek, made sure to appear on “River to River,” a statewide program that’s both a radio show and a podcast.
That’s a very different, and more serious, setting than hangout-style shows like Rogan’s, where guests shoot the breeze for hours on end.
In a new story describing Rogan’s “second thoughts” about Trump, Bloomberg’s Ted Mann writes that, in 2024, “Rogan’s benefit to Trump’s political campaign wasn’t just the size of his audience, but the chord he strikes with a cohort of younger, male voters. Those voters, who helped power Trump’s win, are now souring on the administration, if not disengaging altogether.”
This is certainly evident in some of the midterm season early-vote data.
Political commentator Mark Halperin brought up the absence of a Trump podcast strategy this time around on his “2WAY” show. He called it a mystery: “Why aren’t the president and the vice president on Rogan? Why aren’t they on Andrew Schulz? Maybe because they don’t think the atmosphere would be favorable, as it was two years ago.”
It certainly would not be as favorable.
Schulz said of Trump, in July 2025, “I voted for none of this. He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.”
And Rogan, in May of this year, called Trump’s IRS settlement and immunity agreement “so crazy” and likened it to something out of a dictatorship: “Then you just go straight Uday Hussein.”
