In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2024 win, which defied both pollster’s predictions and the greater cash reserves of the Kamala Harris campaign, many on the left are debating about podcasts, of all things. Is it time for Democrats to support, or perhaps create, their own Joe Rogan?
“People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point. That wouldn’t have helped her,” argued The Nation legal commentator Elie Mystal on X. “Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN. Somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to, without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires like Elon Musk.”
As The Independent has reported, men voted decisively for Donald Trump in nearly every category. Trump and his allies helped spread their message to this group by sitting down with a variety of podcasters, live streamers, and comedians with large male followings and/or conservative-leaning politics, sometimes dubbed the “manosphere.”
And no one in this media world is more influential than Joe Rogan, the comedian and UFC commentator who hosts the Joe Rogan Experience.
The show, which features a variety of guests from the worlds of comedy, entertainment, sports, and politics, is the top show on Spotify and has an audience of at least 14.5 million listeners. Some 80 percent of those listeners are men, according to Edison Research, 67 percent of them independents or Republican-aligned.
In the final stages of the campaign, Rogan interviewed Trump, Vice President-Elect JD Vance, and Elon Musk, the Trump campaign’s most prominent supporter. Then the host went on to endorse Trump directly. (Rogan and Harris also discussed an interview, but it never came to fruition.)
While Rogan and his guests frequently chat about things entirely unrelated to politics, ranging from drugs to history to mixed martial arts, his show remains the sort of platform any campaign would dream about.
Still, some are skeptical the Democrats should try — or even could — recreate the Rogan experience, but for the left.
As social media journalist Taylor Lorenz recently argued, the right-wing media ecosystem, which includes outlets like the Daily Wire and platforms like video-sharing service Rumble, has received considerable funding for years from conservative megadonors and investors, a trend without parallel on the left.
“Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want,” she writes. “Left leaning influencers argue for things like higher taxes on the rich, regulations on corporations, and policies that curb the power of elites. Wealthy mega donors aren’t going to start pouring money into a media ecosystem that directly contradicts their own financial interests.”
Others suggested it’s not that Democrats need to create a new Joe Rogan to win; it’s that they need to create policies that appeal to the more independent-minded men who make up his audience in the first place.
“I think it could help if Democrats had a better media ecosystem to ensure everybody hears what they have to say, but one problem they’re facing is that many of the voters who decide elections do not like, believe, or agree with the things Democrats are saying,” progressive commentator Osita Nwanevu wrote on X.
“Democrats had their own Joe Rogan,” journalist Ryan Grim recently noted. “Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020.”
Hasan Piker, one of the few highly popular left-wing streamers, made a similar argument on X on Wednesday, noting that the politics of the Democratic party are not in alignment with the more online corners of the left.
“Republican independent media is directly linked to the party in ways that the dems cannot recreate among the independent ecosystem because they’re ideologically opposed to bernie style populist sentiment the base wants to hear,” he wrote.
