How podcasts swayed the 2024 election

Around 2:45 on the morning of November 6, Donald Trump beckoned Dana White to the lectern to address the sea of MAGA-hatted supporters assembled to celebrate the former president’s election victory.

In his brief but animated remarks at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship made sure to thank a cadre of figures who might just have been the key to Trump’s shocking triumph. “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys,” White said, “and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan!”

You would be forgiven for not knowing who all these people are. No doubt many of the faithful assembled to cheer Trump were perplexed as well. But for many of the young Americans who turned out to vote for the Republican nominee this year in numbers not seen in decades, these figures might be the reason why.

In the wake of Trump’s win, the drastic political realignment that catapulted him to the White House has been much discussed. But he also won thanks in no small part to a vast media realignment in which the traditional press — TV networks and newspapers that have seen their audiences and revenues shrivel over the years — has been supplanted in influence and audience by an alternative media ecosystem made up primarily of guys with microphones and millions of obsessive fans.

In the 2016 election, cable news and its star hosts were considered kingmakers. Morning Joe and primetime CNN prime time were the laser-beam focus not just of Trump and his campaign but of the wider political and media establishment. When Trump was first elected, his close friend Sean Hannity suddenly became one of the most powerful men in media.

Cable news is no longer the sun around which the American political system orbits. Not only did both Trump and Harris lean on independent media for much of their campaigns, the big three cable news networks all saw their election night audiences shrink dramatically from 2020. CNN shed half its audience.

One senior Trump campaign official, in a jubilant mood when we spoke, said the repudiation of the press inherent to Trump’s win is a self-inflicted wound for the media.

“Mainstream media lost the trust of the country after non-stop lies,” the official said. “The press told people the border was secure, inflation was transitory and Biden was competent. Americans aren’t dumb.”

Piers Morgan, who spent his career in traditional media, saw the writing on the wall this year. His show for Rupert Murdoch’s British cable network TalkTV had a tiny audience on television but a large and growing one on YouTube, and Morgan made the decision to leave cable and go fully digital, hosting his show exclusively online.

“The conventional media has to wake up and smell the cappuccino and realize that, actually, the future is going to be YouTube-dominated,” he told me. “This was a very transformative moment. The new media bared their fangs and made the old media look at their whole business model and realize that they’ve got to change.”

Given Trump’s disdain for the media, it’s no surprise that he ended up focusing his attention on alternatives. In 2024, he appeared on a series of massively popular podcasts, under the direction of young campaign staffers and his teenaged son Barron Trump, who reportedly recommended he appear on Adin Ross’s show.

“He definitely made a calculated decision sometime in the summer that his main media strategy was going to be doing the big podcasts on YouTube,” Morgan said.

That blitz culminated in Trump’s three-hour confab with Joe Rogan, which was viewed more than 70 million times across YouTube, Spotify and other platforms, and yielded a bombshell endorsement from the talk titan a day before the election.

Democrats sought to embrace new media too, albeit less successfully than the swashbuckling Trump. At the Democratic National Convention, journalists grumbled that the red carpet was rolled out for “creators” who enjoyed a VIP box overlooking the arena, while many reporters were penned up in a small section of nosebleed seats. Don Lemon, another ex-cable news star who has embraced YouTube, opted for the creator box.

“This was the podcast and social-media election and some political and election strategists didn’t get it,” Lemon told me. “YouTube and the like are the future of media along with other digital, streaming and social media sites.”

While Trump appeared on Rogan, Harris appeared on the massively popular Call Her Daddy podcast. That interview reached an audience of millions, though it was dwarfed by Trump’s Rogan hit and produced little buzz. Harris, seen by many Americans as a scripted politician, is inherently less compelling than Trump in the podcast setting. Yet the Call Her Daddy interview proved just how valuable the Harris campaign considered such an appearance: according to the Washington Examiner, they spent an eyewatering six figures building a set for the interview.

The fracturing of American media doesn’t just mean the traditional press is facing an existential crisis. It also means that voters are living in entirely different worlds from each other, where two candidates in a presidential election are either liberator or fascist, depending on where you get your news.

On the most popular podcasts in America, Trump was a hero. He survived not just political death over his conduct following the 2020 election, which even many of his loyalists deemed at the time disqualifying, but dodged literal death after an assassination attempt last summer. He’s gone on to weather several criminal indictments and relentless attacks from the press.

There is no doubt that his election has elevated this new media ecosystem that embraces Trump’s brand of bizarro meme politics, while dealing a massive blow to a traditional press that has sought for years to convince Americans to dump him.

“A lot of people have been prematurely predicting the demise of legacy/corporate media for a long time,” Lemon said. “It’s not dead yet. But it appears to be on life-support.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.