1 week Ago By Victoria-craw
Looking at the blitz of interviews for this year’s presidential election, you could be forgiven for thinking podcasts will decide the vote. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her Republican rival Donald Trump have both appeared on a series of podcasts and online interviews as the campaign enters its final three weeks. This week Harris sat down this week with Charlamagne tha God on his popular radio show The Breakfast Club .
She had already appeared on Call Her Daddy , a sex podcast hosted by Alex Cooper, whose previous episodes include frank conversations about matters such as correct use of a dildo. Trump has appeared on Full Send , hosted by two YouTube pranksters turned podcasters called Nelk Boys, another podcast hosted by comedian Theo Von and appeared on influencer and wrestler Logan Paul’s YouTube channel. Trump also spoke with controversial internet personality Adin Ross, who gave him a gold Rolex watch and a customised Tesla Cybertruck as gifts .
Both Harris and Trump are now said to be in talks with the perhaps the biggest podcaster of them all, Joe Rogan, to appear on his show which has 14.5 million listeners a month, the most on Spotify. While Harris and Trump are still doing legacy media – even sitting down with Fox News – the rush for podcasts shows the media landscape has changed significantly since even the 2020 election.
Not only that, podcasters offer political candidates access to a specific audience and allow them to be heard in a format that is far more intimate and engaged than TV. In the case of Charlamagne tha God, whose real name is Lenard Larry McKelvey, the audience is eight million monthly listeners, many of whom are black men, a group that Harris is struggling with. In her appearance on his show, Harris said she would be open to studying reparations and touted her agenda to help boost the economy among the black community.
McKelvey deployed his signature combative style and accused Harris of being “too scripted”: she responded by saying that was evidence of her “discipline”. Trump was not subjected to such an interrogation when speaking with Adin Ross, whose live stream attracted 500,000 viewers at its peak. Ross allowed Trump to drone on mostly unchallenged for 90 minutes but the listeners were the prize for Trump: a mostly young, mostly male audience he needs to win the election.
Other online interviews have been attractive to the candidates because of the size of their listenership. Call Her Daddy has 3.7 million monthly listeners, making it the third most listened to podcast on Spotify.
By comparison, the CBS TV show 60 Minutes , which has made a tradition of interviewing both presidential candidates in an election year, gets 10 million viewers for a strong episode of its weekly magazine show. Yet podcast interviews lack the journalistic rigour of traditional political interviews, allowing candidates to dodge uncomfortable scrutiny. Among the softball questions asked by Logan Paul to Trump was whether aliens existed: Trump said it was “very possible”.
Being asked to pontificate on aliens or open up on more personal issues are a small price to pay for access to millions of subscribers. Paul has more than 50 million social media followers with 27 million on Instagram alone. Two videos posted online of Trump with Jake Paul, Paul’s brother, have got 17 million views.
Among the few moments of genuine revelation was the interview with Theo Von, where Trump probed the host on his admission that he used to do a lot of cocaine, on top of drinking excessively. A genuinely interested Trump asked: “Which is worse?” Rogan could prove to be trickier for Trump as he is unafraid to be frank about his views and is a canny interviewer. Previously, Rogan has expressed support for former independent Presidential candidate and anti-vaxxer, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr , who is now on the Trump team. Rogan has said he is “not a Trump supporter in any way, shape, or form” but has also praised Trump and said the economy did “really well” under his Presidency. Rogan’s audience is 71 per cent male with the average age of his listeners being 24, meaning that for both Trump and Harris it could swing them the vote, said Adam Davidson, a former staff writer for the New Yorker turned veteran podcast producer.
He said that Trump’s podcast strategy appears to be an appeal to the “Bro-sphere” as it appeals to the skillset that he had. “Trump is doing as many of these as he can because it’s exactly the kind of vibe he thrives in,” Mr Davidson told i . “Famously Kamala has struggled with that.
” Davidson called the Bro-sphere podcast style “faux honesty” where Trump can come off as spontaneous and “perhaps a little sloppy” and it will appeal to the listeners. “The Bro-sphere podcasts target young men, and a particular type of young man who fancies themselves as an independent thinker, socially liberal but just sceptical of the official story, skeptical of science, institutions. “You have this audience, it’s in the millions, possibly in the tens of millions and I don’t know how many will vote, but they’re up for grabs in a way few people in the country are.
“It really could be the podcast election...
and it could come down to these Bro-sphere podcasts which is a shocking thing to say”. Harris’ strategy appears to be more about boosting enthusiasm among her supporters and showing people who she is, Davidson said. Polls have shown voters are open to Harris but feel like they don’t know her.
“She wants people to see her as an authentic person and somebody that could have a drink with,” Davidson said. “That makes a lot of sense. If I was on her team I’d want her on lots of podcasts.
I don’t know that it plays the same but it’s as crucial for her as it is for Trump.”.
