Who’s winning the podcast midterms?
We took the 1,411 Senate, governor and House candidates on this November’s ballot, went looking for them in the guest lists of this year’s podcast episodes, and worked out each party’s share of the listeners on the shows where its candidates appeared.
810 candidates have been on a podcast this year
Of the candidates on the ballot, 84% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans have been on at least one podcast this year. The other 214 haven’t been on any, and 133 of them are Republicans.
Democrats have made more appearances and been on more shows. The biggest gap is in share of voice, where their total is about twice the Republican one.
The show counts overlap, since plenty of shows hosted both sides.
Democrats have led on monthly appearances since August
Republicans led by 483 to 362 in January and the gap narrowed through the spring. Democrats edged ahead in June, 510 to 500, and have led since August, 579 to 490 that month and 606 to 567 in September.
Democrats won every month on share of voice. May was the closest, when Tim Burchett went on Joe Rogan’s show, and August the widest, 15 million to 6 million.
The dashed line runs to the latest 30 days we have, 11 September to 10 October.
Democrats are more than twice as likely to go on a show with more than 10,000 listeners
Democrats tend to go on bigger shows. Of their appearances, 24% are on shows with more than 10,000 listeners per episode, against 10% for Republicans. Most appearances on both sides are still on small shows.
Republicans lean harder on a few big shows. Their five largest carry 55% of their share of voice, against 40% for the Democrats’ five largest. So one big booking moves their total more.
Not many candidates go on shows that lean the other way
Where we know a show’s political leaning, just 5% of Democratic appearances were on right-leaning shows and 10% of Republican appearances were on left-leaning ones.
Most candidates stay on their own side, with 83% of Democratic appearances on left-leaning shows and 84% of Republican ones on right-leaning shows. Democrats go on centrist shows more often, 12% against 6%.
Share of voice in ten of the big races
We picked ten races by hand, six Senate contests that look competitive and four governor races in big states. For each race we show the candidate on each side with the largest share of voice.
Democrats lead all six Senate races on share of voice, and Republicans lead three of the four governor races. The biggest gaps in appearances are in California, where Steve Hilton has 104 to Xavier Becerra’s 21, and Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed has 94 to Mike Rogers’s 26.
The ten candidates with the most podcast appearances
Steve Hilton, the Republican running for governor of California, tops the list with 104 appearances. Ro Khanna is second with 101 and Abdul El-Sayed third with 94. Six of the ten are Democrats.
Khanna has the largest share of voice of the ten, 4.9 million, ahead of Hilton’s 4.2 million. Tim Burchett’s share of voice was boosted a lot by one episode with Joe Rogan.
How we counted
We track more than 4 million podcasts at Rephonic and use AI to pull the guests out of episode transcripts. For this page we took the 1,411 general-election candidates for US Senate, governor and House and matched their names against the guests on episodes published between 1 January and 10 October 2026.
Two AI models then checked every match against the episode’s show notes and transcript, and we took out the ones where a candidate was talked about but wasn’t a guest. That left 6,845 appearances across 1,960 podcasts. An appearance is one candidate on one show, so repeat visits count once.
By listeners we mean a show’s estimated downloads per episode, which is close to the number of people listening but not the same thing. Share of voice is the listeners of each show a candidate appeared on, added up for each party. Third-party and independent candidates are left out of the comparisons. Monthly figures count each show once per candidate per month.
Our guide to podcasts for political campaigns explains how to build a list of shows in your district and what to look at before accepting a booking.