Podcasts for Political Campaigns: A 2026 Guide for Candidates
Let's imagine that you're the communications director for a House candidate in a competitive district. Your media plan is heavy on local TV and mailers, and you already know the weak spot in it. The voters you most need to move stopped watching local news years ago, and a lot of them are listening to podcasts instead.
We track more than 4 million podcasts at Rephonic, and every week we watch PR and marketing teams use that database to get booked on the right shows. We don't run campaigns, but a lot of that playbook looks like it should carry over to a candidate. Here's what 2024 and the early 2026 race suggest, and how you'd go about finding the shows your voters actually listen to.
Key Takeaways
- Podcasts stopped being a novelty in 2024. Trump's three-hour sit-down with Joe Rogan alone passed 38 million views on YouTube, an audience cable news can't match.
- More than 130 million Americans listen to a podcast every week, and about a third of US adults now get news this way.
- Podcast listeners lean civic. Weekly listeners are more likely than the average adult to vote in primaries and to have volunteered on a campaign, according to YouGov.
- The channel looks underpriced. Podcasts take up 4.8% of the time Americans spend with digital media but 0.8% of digital ad dollars.
- For most campaigns the opening is likely down the ballot. A few niche shows inside the district can matter more than one hard-to-land national booking.
- Vet the host before your candidate says yes. A hostile or fringe show can cost you more than a friendly one gains.
Table of Contents
Why 2024 got called the podcast election
Trump spent the last stretch of the 2024 race on a podcast tour. He started in June on Logan Paul's Impaulsive and sat for something like two dozen long interviews on shows with big young-male audiences, among them Theo Von, Lex Fridman and Andrew Schulz's Flagrant. Eight days before the vote he taped nearly three hours with Joe Rogan. The through-line was young men who had drifted from cable news and, in a lot of cases, from voting, and the campaign was courting them in the open.
That single episode passed 38 million views on YouTube, while Fox News, the most-watched cable network, averaged about 2.65 million primetime viewers across all of 2025. The two numbers aren't measured the same way, a cumulative view count isn't an average nightly audience, but the gap is hard to ignore. People will sit through a long, unedited conversation when they'd never watch a debate.
Harris used podcasts too, taping Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper to reach young women on abortion. But Democrats came to the format late, and much of the analysis afterward argued they had handed the space to the other side. How much any of it actually moved votes is hard to say. What's clearer is that both parties now treat where a candidate shows up to talk as part of the plan.
The audience is big, and it votes
Podcast listening isn't a fringe habit anymore. Weekly listening in the US hit an all-time high in 2026, 45% of Americans age 12 and up, roughly 130 million people, up from 15% in 2017. About a third of US adults now get news from podcasts.
Podcast listeners also lean civic. YouGov found that weekly listeners are more likely than the average adult to always vote in primaries, and sizeable shares have attended a campaign event or volunteered recently. They also tend to trust what they hear. Among people who get news on podcasts, 87% expect it to be mostly accurate, and most trust it about as much as their other sources. People spend hours a week with a host's voice in their ears, and they tend to act on a host's recommendation more than on a paid spot.
There may be a pricing gap, too. Podcasts take up 4.8% of the time Americans spend with digital media but only 0.8% of digital ad dollars, so the ad market hasn't fully caught up to the attention.
The biggest shows usually aren't the target
Once a comms team buys into podcasts, the pull is to go straight for the giants, the shows everyone read about. For a presidential campaign that can land those bookings, fine. For a House candidate or a state legislator, it usually isn't worth the chase.
A booking on a national comedy show reaches millions of people who mostly can't vote for your candidate. A local show with a few thousand listeners inside the district can be worth more of the candidate's time, even if its download number looks tiny next to Rogan's. It's the same point we make to brands. The download count is the least useful number on the page, and who listens and where they live usually matters more than how many.
It already happens down the ballot. Republican businessman Nate Morris launched his 2026 Kentucky Senate campaign in a 20-minute interview on Donald Trump Jr.'s Triggered podcast. In Texas, Democratic state representative James Talarico went on Rogan in the summer of 2025 and watched his following jump past a million before he entered the Senate race. Both were after the part of that audience that could actually vote for them.
If you're a Democrat that hunts, go on hunting shows.
Richard Fawal, CEO of Voxtopica, in Campaigns & Elections.
Worth one caution. Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist who runs the Center for Campaign Innovation, calls "do more podcasts" the wrong takeaway from 2024. Getting booked is the easy part. An appearance only does something if your candidate has something worth saying to people who otherwise skip the news.
Imagine we're running comms for a Senate campaign
Imagine we're running communications for a Senate campaign in Arizona. Our candidate is strong on veterans' issues and cost of living, and we need independent men in Maricopa County who don't watch the news and have never opened a campaign email.
We wouldn't open by emailing Joe Rogan. The first job is a list. In Rephonic we'd search more than 4 million shows by topic, so veterans, Arizona politics and the outdoors, then filter by audience, narrowing to shows with listeners in Arizona, in the age and gender range we're after, with the interests our voters tend to share. Out of millions of podcasts, that leaves a few dozen worth pitching.
For each one we'd check the listener estimate and demographics to confirm the audience is genuinely local, read a recent transcript to hear how the host treats a guest, then pull the host or producer's verified email and send a short, specific pitch. That's the point of a database built for outreach rather than listening. Apple Podcasts and Spotify are made for people who want something to play. They won't tell you how many listeners a show has in Arizona, or hand you the producer's email. Rephonic does both.
Vet the show before your candidate says yes
Not every booking is worth taking. A candidate can walk into a show whose host turns hostile, or whose audience is the opposite of the one they need, and the clip that comes out follows them for the rest of the race. When Benjamin Netanyahu went on the Nelk Boys' Full Send podcast in 2025, the criticism came from both the left and the right and the channel lost more than 10,000 subscribers in a day. Harris had the opposite regret, later saying she wanted to do Rogan and let her team talk her out of it. A podcast runs unedited, so a weak moment airs with no producer to cut it.
So it's worth vetting first. Before your candidate accepts, you'd want to know who the host is, what they've said, who else they've platformed, and who's actually listening. That's what Rephonic's episode data is for. You can read transcripts, see a show's past guests and sponsors, check the topics and tone it leans toward, and size up its audience before anyone commits.
Run it like a program
A single podcast hit gives you a clip and not much else. To get more out of it, it helps to treat podcast outreach like the rest of your media plan rather than a one-off.
- Build targeted lists and keep them fresh. Save your searches so new shows that fit your criteria surface as they launch, instead of starting discovery from scratch every week.
- Track the pipeline. Prospected, pitched, followed up, booked. If a host doesn't reply, send one follow-up and move on.
- Watch combined reach, not single-show reach. Add up the listener estimates across the shows you book, and check where two shows share an audience so you're not reaching the same ears twice.
- Keep an ear on the wider conversation. Set alerts for your candidate's name, the opponent's, and your core issues across more than 4 million shows, so you hear when you're being talked about.
Final thoughts
A podcast tour helped carry a national campaign in 2024, and the rest of the field has spent the last year catching up. Democratic donors are weighing tens of millions of dollars to build their own podcast and creator bench, and governors and senators in both parties have started their own shows.
For most campaigns, though, the better bet is probably quieter than a marquee booking or a nine-figure project. Find the few dozen shows your voters listen to, check that the audience and the host are a fit, and send your candidate in prepared. Done well, that reaches people your ad buys won't.
Rephonic is the most complete podcast database for finding and qualifying the right shows, whoever you need to reach. Want to see which podcasts your district is listening to before your opponent does?
Start your 7-day Rephonic trial and build your campaign's list from more than 4 million shows.