Joe Rogan defined the 2024 ‘podcast election.’ But 2026 is a different story

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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.

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“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.

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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.”

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如果说 2024 年是一场“播客选举”，那么 2026 年又会是什么样子呢？

一句简洁的短语恐怕难以概括中期选举媒体环境的复杂性。每个州的情况都各不相同，每场选举也各有差异。

但与2024年相比，基调的转变确实引人注目。这一次，共和党人不再利用“乔·罗根秀”或“西奥·冯的周末访谈”等节目进行竞选宣传。而这些播客主持人也并没有真正为他们加油助威。

特朗普总统的连任引发了一系列关于罗根、冯以及其他所谓的“男性圈”主持人巨大影响力的报道。“播客的政治力量才刚刚开始显现，”斯科特·加洛韦在选后的一篇专栏文章中写道。

这些报道并没有错，但从政治角度来看，那些 2024 年的权力人物已经退居幕后了。

罗根已经转变为特朗普的怀疑论者，经常批评美国移民及海关执法局（ICE）和伊朗战争。“我简直不敢相信我们竟然卷入了这场战争，”罗根在四月份说道。

此外，罗根并没有利用他的节目在本届选举周期中为共和党候选人造势。不过，他之前对德克萨斯州民主党参议员候选人詹姆斯·塔拉里科（James Talarico）的采访视频仍在流传，而且他似乎并不看好塔拉里科的共和党对手肯·帕克斯顿（Ken Paxton）。

其他一些在 2024 年直言不讳的右倾播客主持人，今年也变得沉默得多——这反映出他们对特朗普感到失望，以及对共和党中期选举前景普遍感到担忧。

左倾播客主播们更有活力，尽管在本届选举周期中还没有出现像特朗普在 2024 年做客罗根的节目那样轰动一时的播客时刻。

热门自由派播客节目“Pod Save America”的联合主持人丹·普费弗表示，中期选举的媒体策略有所不同，因为选举情况有所不同。

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP/档案照片

“竞选州级选举的候选人与总统候选人的宣传策略肯定不同，”普费弗告诉CNN。“此外，中期选举的目标选民与总统选举的目标选民获取新闻的习惯也不同。”

也就是说，今年大多数摇摆州的民主党参议员候选人都做客了“拯救美国播客”（Pod Save America）节目，有些候选人甚至多次做客。州长候选人也经常作为嘉宾出席。

有些候选人比其他候选人更倾向于播客这种私密、深入的访谈形式。例如，阿卜杜勒·埃尔-赛义德在过去一个月里就曾做客“Pod Save”、“乔恩·斯图尔特每周秀”和“埃兹拉·克莱因秀”。

另一方面，埃尔-赛义德的共和党对手迈克·罗杰斯则主要活跃于地方媒体和国家电视台。

克莱因在他的播客节目中观察到，目前关注度和候选人表现似乎“不相关”：“在社交媒体和我的动态消息中，到处都是候选人，而那些在民意调查中表现特别好或特别差的候选人，两者之间几乎没有任何联系。”

一旦计票结束，我们就能更好地评估哪些候选人拥有成功的媒体策略，哪些候选人没有。

但播客这种曾经新颖且易于与选民交流的方式，似乎已被所有媒体同化，淹没在信息洪流之中。候选人访谈或许最初是播客形式，但当人们在Instagram上看到相关片段时，它就沦为又一段千篇一律的“侃侃而谈”的内容了。

现在大多数热门播客都以音频和视频的形式存在，可以在 Apple Podcasts 和 YouTube 上收听。许多其他访谈节目（例如有线电视新闻谈话节目）现在也被重新制作成播客。

例如，在爱荷华州，共和党参议员候选人阿什利·欣森和民主党候选人乔什·图雷克都确保出现在“River to River”节目中，这是一个全州范围的广播节目和播客节目。

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这与罗根的那种闲聊式节目截然不同，也更加严肃，在罗根的节目中，嘉宾们会连续几个小时闲聊。

在彭博社记者泰德·曼恩的一篇新报道中，他描述了罗根对特朗普的“重新思考”。曼恩写道，到了2024年，“罗根对特朗普竞选的帮助不仅在于他庞大的听众群体，还在于他与一群年轻男性选民产生的共鸣。这些曾助力特朗普胜选的选民，如今对本届政府的态度正在转变，甚至完全脱离了特朗普。”

这一点在部分中期选举提前投票数据中确实有所体现。

政治评论员马克·哈尔珀林在他的“2WAY”节目中提到了特朗普此次没有推出播客节目的原因。他称之为谜团：“为什么总统和副总统不上罗根的节目？为什么不上安德鲁·舒尔茨的节目？也许是因为他们认为现在的气氛不像两年前那样有利了。”

这肯定不会那么有利。

舒尔茨在2025年7月谈到特朗普时说：“我投票支持的所有东西都没投给他。他所做的一切都与我投票支持的东西完全相反。”

今年 5 月，罗根称特朗普与美国国税局达成的和解协议和豁免协议“太疯狂了”，并将其比作独裁政权的行径：“然后你就直接效仿乌代·侯赛因了。”