Democrats are missing the point on Joe Rogan

The weeks after an election are open season for pet political theories. An electorate as massive and sprawling as America’s will never swing on just one thing. But that’s no fun to admit. So why not share your one thing—you can be as right as anyone else. But among the Monday-morning quarterbacks of social media, one strain of analysis seems poised to rule them all: that liberals need to find their own version of Joe Rogan. 

As expected, the viral idea was met with a bit of enthusiasm, then a whole lot of scorn, before eventually reaching its final stage: memes. 

But, despite the social media clowning, it’s not hard to understand where the idea came from. Rogan, the undisputed champion of the podcast medium, has crept rightward since endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2020. Since 2020, his unprecedented Spotify deal has netted him upwards of $200 million and counting—the streaming giant re-upped this February which gives a not-so-subtle clue to Rogan’s invaluable reach. The most popular show on Spotify for four years running, The Joe Rogan Experience boasts 14.5 million subscribers on the platform as of March. That’s almost three times more than the second-most popular show. During the two weeks ahead of Election Day, he had Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk on his show. (Rogan invited Harris on his show, but he explained via X that her campaign declined to travel to Austin, a condition for the live recording.) Then, right before Election Day, Rogan endorsed Trump.

The “leftist Joe Rogan” pipe dream goes up in smoke upon close examination. In Vulture, Nicholas Quah argues that the idea is “little more than fantasy wish-casting, driven by a top-down desire to inorganically bring into the world something that can only exist organically.” The effectiveness of a Rogan endorsement is tied to the very fact that he’s not an inherently political figure; for a political movement to build their own Rogan would be sort of like trying to force a campaign jingle into the mainstream versus coopting a successful song as a campaign soundtrack. (At least with music, the Democrats went the latter route with Charli XCX’s Brat this summer. The effectiveness of the now famous “kamala IS brat” tweet will undoubtedly be studied generations from now by legions of American Empire scholars.)

The thing about Rogan that separates him from the more blatantly right-wing podcasters, like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owen, is that by not foregrounding politics, he’s able to draw a listenership that actually isn’t that right-leaning. An Edison Research study found that the audience is, unsurprisingly, very male (80%), but perhaps more surprisingly, extremely nonpartisan: 27% identified as Democrats and 32% as Republicans. Most significantly, 35% ID’d as “Independent or Something Else.” In today’s polarized political climate, where else can a candidate reach an audience that is 35% undecided? And more than that, a group of Undecideds who agree on one key thing: They intrinsically trust the man behind the mic.

I called Quah a few days after his piece ran because I needed to talk through something that had been bugging me: After three decades of the political radio host Rush Limbaugh and the conservative talk radio megalith, how did the Democrats miss the growing power of podcasts to convince the electorate?

Quah was quick to differentiate between Limbaugh and Rogan. Democrats, with Crooked Media and Ezra Klein; and Republicans, with Kirk, Carlson, and Dan Bongioni have extremely popular shows that serve, and rile up, their respective bases. Certainly the two sides’ tenor is starkly different, but the ability to win new votes seems negligible in either case. “But people primarily go to Rogan for something else and develop a kinship with him on something else,” Quah tells me. “So when he does weigh in on a political issue, it feels less like you’re being sold and more like this person that you care about and have a relationship with has this belief.” Quah says he’s been batting around the idea that as church attendance falls, podcasters have started to fill the space left by pastors. “We go to fucking podcasts to try to understand ourselves.”

In that sense, the appropriate Rogan comparison is more Howard Stern than it is Limbaugh. The goal of Rogan—and Theo Von, Lex Fridman, Bill Simmons, and Alex Cooper—is not to appeal to policy wonks or college Republicans. Everything is political, sure, but politics, in its most essential form, is the art of persuasion. And in an election where a few thousand votes in a handful of swing states was always going to be the difference, reaching the persuadable in one of the few remaining spaces where they can be persuaded seems straightforwardly the right move.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published a piece featuring conversations with 13 young undecided voters from August through November. Three of the interviewees mentioned Rogan. One, a white 22-year-old man from New York, said that Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience “was huge for me. Trump enthusiastically said yes to a three-hour, open, honest conversation with Joe Rogan, who was a former Bernie bro. I think it’s very telling about which candidate is authentic and which candidate is not.”

Rather than do Rogan, the Harris campaign leaned on celebrity support: The vice president touted endorsements from people like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, and held sold-out rallies with performances by Megan Thee Stallion and Bruce Springsteen. She avoided the podcast space until the last moment, when she appeared on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy and former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke, and did a radio interview on The Breakfast Club with cohost Charlamagne tha God. According to the Financial Times, Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, said this week that Harris declined to appear on Rogan out of fear by some in the campaign that it would prompt backlash. After all, they reasoned, Rogan has been maligned for his positions on vaccines, trans rights, and his repeated use of derogatory language. But now, after November 5th’s results, it’s hard not to wonder if, when it comes to convincing new or undecided voters, a podcast appearance might’ve been more powerful than a viral Swift Instagram. 

There’s been a lot written about the intimacy of the radio and podcast medium, but Ira Glass probably put it best in a recent interview with The New Yorker: “It’s like you’re in the bed in the dark with somebody. Not seeing somebody and just hearing them, and hearing the silences between sentences—the intimacy is just built in. And it’s also not hard to achieve.” Putting Rogan on while you sit in traffic or while you wash the dishes or in bed before you sleep creates the illusion of a relationship. There’s trust there. If even a little of that trust can rub off onto a politician, that’s worth a thousand TV ads or cable news hits where the medium too clearly exposes the artifice. 

In August, Harris’s campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said at the CNN-Politico Grill: “We all know who the vice president is, but the American people don’t really know her that well, and they don’t know her story.” Declining the chance to speak, at length and off book, to millions of “Independent or Something Else” voters seems like a clear misstep by Harris. 

Perhaps this is just one more Pet Take to explain the hard-to-fathom appeal of Trump. There’s almost certainly no one thing that Harris could have done to win on November 5. But the audio medium has been a dominant force in politics for as long as radios have been in homes. Which is why it’s so vexing that the Democrats seemed to miss it this cycle. FDR and Winston Churchill understood its power, but there’s a better example from those early days. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Pappy O’Daniel became the central force in Texas politics by riding his ultra-popular midday radio show into the Governor’s Mansion and then the United States Senate. The political sharps of the time doubted him: He was a political novice. And he was corrupt and ineffectual once he reached those posts. But he wasn’t like other politicians. The voters felt they knew him. He came into their living room every day. So, he was theirs.

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