Analysis by Steve Ahern
With just over a week to go before the American election, attention has fallen on the role of podcasting in this campaign.
Joe Rogan’s 14 million followers can now hear a conversation recorded with Republican candidate Donald Trump who seeks to win young male voters. The podcast is almost 3 hours long. Rogan is the most listened to podcast in America.
Kamala Harris appeared on Call Her Daddy, the second most listened to US podcast, hosted by Alex Cooper, one of the 10 most popular podcasts for women. Her interview was 45 minutes long. It is not known at this time if Harris will appear with Rogan.
A Bloomberg article written by Ashley Carman says “rather than spending a majority of their time talking to mainstream or legacy media outlets, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and their VP picks have focused instead on speaking to the masses through podcasts.”
She lists the podcasts that the four candidates have appeared on, which include: Theo Von, Lex Fridman, Logan Paul and Dan Bongino, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, the New York Times’ The Interview, Call Her Daddy, All The Smoke and Charlamagne Tha God’s The Breakfast Club, Pod Save America, SmartLess, Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things and Ezra Klein.
“As far as straightforward interview shows go, the candidates have checked off a whole bunch from Edison Research’s Top 50 list,” says Carman.
This is not the first time podcasts have played a part in an American election. Barack Obama was the first to reach voters via podcasts and successfully mobilised many to turn out to vote for him. America does not have compulsory voting, so convincing people to actually go out to vote is half the battle.
In his 2026 campaign attempt against Joe Biden, Trump did not appear on many podcasts and stuck to special interest shows such as a Golf Podcast and a Border Patrol political podcast, according to a listing in Podchaser.
In that campaign Trump spent most digital advertising money on Facebook, but just how much is hard to quantify. Money was also spent on radio and tv, which is transparent thanks to well established regulatory legislation for broadcast media outlets.
In this year’s campaign the Brennan Centre estimates that $619 million has been spent on political advertising on digital media companies such as Google and Meta, with at least $248 million focused on the presidential race. Harris has outspent Trump by about 4 times as much, according to Brennan Centre analysis, but has Trump ad spending gone to other platforms such as podcasts and programmatic placement?
Brennan Centre ad tracking counts podcasting as ‘digital’ not ‘radio,’ but the proportion of spending to podcasts is unknown.
In the US, candidates and their supporters can advertise right up to election day because election blackout periods are deemed unconstitutional. Social and search media is unregulated by Federal Laws, but Meta and Google have implemented their own guidelines for blackout periods.
Both those major players have implemented transparency guidelines for political ads and, in the last week before the election Meat will “block new social issue, electoral, and political ads during the final week of the general election in the US,” but that won’t stop existing ads from running.
Alphabet (Google) will implement a political ad blackout after the election, intended to “limit the potential for confusion.” That ban is meant to stop disinformation causing confusion about who won the election, which was a factor in the Capitol Riots after the last election.
With these restrictions, election advertising appears to be moving again. Spending will not be known until after the election, but it appears that more advertising is being spent on programmatic platforms, including podcasts. trump is also getting free social media coverage on his own Truth social publication and on Elon Musk’s X publication.
In Australia we have government regulated blackout periods for radio and tv advertising. The election advertising blackout of three days before an election only applies to broadcasters, it does not include online services and print media.
With an Australian election looming next year, Australian politicians may also try the long form podcast interview strategy adopted by Trump and Harris.
With the ability to hyper-target audiences, political parties may also use more podcast advertising to reach some audience segments, as Trump and Harris are doing, and they may also advertise in podcasts to get around the election blackout period.
There is still plenty of time for the Australian election to be called, the last possible date is 27 September 2025, but political pundits are tipping it to be earlier rather than later. When the Australian election is finally announced, watch carefully where the politicians spend their interview time and where they place their audio ads.
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