Donald Trump was joined for his post-midnight election victory address by his family, his running mate JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. One apparent outlier was Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Speaking third, White thanked YouTube pranksters the Nelk Boys, Louisianan stand-up comedian and podcaster Theo Von, controversial Kick streamer Adin Ross, and “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”. Given the US election result, White’s description of the hugely popular podcaster seems apt.
In the lead-up to November 5, both Kamala Harris and Trump scheduled a string of sitdowns with an eclectic mix of influencers, sports players, comedians and media personalities. It’s not difficult to understand why. Almost half of Americans — an estimated 135 million people — say they listen to a podcast monthly, which is more than twice the share who said the same in 2016, during Trump’s first presidential run. On election day, the two top streamers, right-wingers Dan Bongino and Steven Crowder, raked in around half a million viewers each, exceeding all media companies except for FOX and NBC.
But the election results indicate the presidential candidates did not garner equal success in this new media space.
The porous ecosystem of the podcasting and streaming “manosphere” connects stand-up comedy, mixed martial arts and online bro culture. And it elevates figures such as Elon Musk, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, who offer unapologetic support for traditional gender roles and attacks against “wokeism”.
Rogan might be the gravitational centre around which this ecosystem orbits, and it is a welcoming place for Trump’s anti-establishment message and his rebuke of mainstream media. The long and unstructured form of Rogan’s and adjacent podcasts and their sympathetic hosts allows Trump’s loose rhetorical style — his self-described “weave” — to land for audiences familiar with, and wanting, spontaneity and easygoing flow. And it is likely that these appearances helped him to propel traditionally low-propensity young male voters to the ballot box.
In his bid to court the so-called “bro vote,” Trump engaged dozens of podcasters and streamers on the political fringe who share a common audience of young, politically disengaged men. In the final days of the campaign, Trump — followed by Vance, then billionaire backer Musk—went on The Joe Rogan Experience, America’s most-consumed podcast. These appearances culminated in Rogan offering his endorsement of the Republican ticket, arguably the zenith for a US presidential election where nontraditional media played an unprecedented role.
The Trump campaign’s media strategy appears to have paid off. Trump scored massive gains among young men, winning this demographic 49% to Harris’s 47%. This marks a dramatic swing from 2020, when Joe Biden picked up most of the young male vote (52% to Trump’s 41%).
Trump also made significant inroads in wresting away votes from traditional Democratic constituencies. According to exit polls, Latino men veered to Trump in higher numbers than ever before, across red and blue states alike. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ edge among Black men was blunted enough to tip the scale in Trump’s favour in key swing states such as Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
By contrast, there are few signs that Harris’s approach to nontraditional media benefited her campaign, despite the Democratic nominee’s surge of early enthusiasm from young people on social media. An appearance with Rogan, which was reportedly on the cards, ultimately fell through after the two parties were unable to agree on interview conditions. This was viewed by some as a missed opportunity for her campaign to engage with young men. But whether she would have found success with Rogan’s audience remains an open question.
In the election post-mortem, some commentators and DNC insiders have argued that the Democrats need their own Rogan. But they did have their own Rogan in 2020, when Bernie Sanders, then a Democratic primary candidate, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and secured the host’s endorsement. At the time, Sanders was lambasted for going on the show.
Harris’s strategy instead largely focused on reaching Independent and moderate Republican women through appearing on shows like Call Her Daddy, a podcast that is hugely popular among women, most of whom are young and a sizeable chunk of whom are independent voters. And Harris’s interview with former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson for their podcast All the Smoke was seen as an attempt to shore up support among Black men.
Harris hemorrhaged votes to Trump on all fronts. The gender gap, though notably wide among young people, did not reach the historic margins that were expected in the so-called “gender election.” Even among cohorts that Harris won — such as Black men, women, and young voters — she secured a far slimmer margin of victory compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Biden in 2020.
For candidates, the benefits of engaging with these non-traditional outlets seem clear: cutting through a saturated media market; leveraging the parasocial relationships between hosts and their fans; less chance of pushback than from a trained journalist.
This election cycle also indicates just how ubiquitous “new media” has become, and its movement from the fringe to the centre. Future campaign strategists will continue to adapt to a mediascape beyond the world of prime-time interviews and broadcast advertising. And Trump’s victory suggests they will need to reckon with its gendered structure and content that — for the most successful shows — speak to the desires and interests of young men.
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