Is the partisan YouTube boom cooling off?

Political YouTubers who saw record-breaking subscriber growth over the past two years are now confronting a tough new reality: there may be a hard ceiling for direct-to-camera red-meat political content, no matter which side of the aisle it's aimed at. New data on political and political-adjacent YouTube channels from Q3 2026 shows that some of the platform's loudest partisan voices have struggled to grow their audiences over the past three months.

Take pro-Trump cheerleader Benny Johnson, who added a whopping 570,000 new subscribers in the third quarter of 2025. A year later, Johnson’s growth has all but stalled out, picking up just 10,000 net new subscribers in Q3 2026. Candace Owens’ channel tells the same story: after gaining 910,000 subscribers in Q3 2025, she added just 70,000 over the same stretch this year. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson went from adding nearly 500,000 subscribers to just 80,000, and Megyn Kelly went from netting 320,000 to a measly 20,000.

Explicitly anti-Trump personalities on the Left haven't fared much better. "Blue MAGA" juggernaut MeidasTouch added only 70,000 subscribers to its main channel last quarter, down from +320,000 a year earlier, while Jennifer Welch's "I've Had It" picked up just 40,000 after adding 350,000 in Q3 2025. I could go on and on: The Bulwark, Adam Mockler, Keith Edwards, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Jack Cocchiarella all grew far more slowly this quarter than they did a year ago.

Since early 2025, I've tracked the 400+ largest partisan-leaning political YouTube channels quarter by quarter. The slowdown this quarter is pretty striking: in aggregate, top political YouTube channels added roughly 67% fewer net new subscribers than they did in the same quarter a year ago (Q3 2025) — and about 20% fewer than just last quarter (Q2 2026).

I have a range of theories as to why this slowdown is happening. For one, 2025 was just a banner year for social-media personalities who leaned into hard partisan tribalism. The first half saw liberal creators ride anti-Trump anger to massive audience growth, while the second half was defined by the Charlie Kirk assassination, which propelled right-wing accounts to new heights. The past few months, by contrast, haven't produced those kinds of macro political moments to drive partisan voices, and without them, growth has cooled. Or the explanation might be simpler: viewers on both sides of the aisle may only have so much appetite for boomer-coded, ragebait breaking news about Trump, and many of these creators are hitting that ceiling sooner than anyone expected.

Putting the overall slowdown aside, a few channels did continue to post notable gains. Progressive video startup More Perfect Union was the fastest-growing partisan-leaning, politics-adjacent channel last quarter, adding an impressive 420,000 net new subscribers and essentially tying right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA, which has kept growing its audience on the platform one year after its founder's assassination. 

More Perfect Union’s most successful video recently is an investigation into “America’s biggest berry empire,” exposing unfair practices and corruption in the produce industry. It has received over 8 million views. 

A handful of creators on both sides of the aisle who work in a similar investigative, street-journalism style also grew: right-wing reactionary Tyler Oliveira added 200,000 net new subscribers, left-leaning anti-surveillance creator Benn Jordan netted 150,000, lefty video journalist Johnny Harris added 180,000, and Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan gained 170,000.

Here are the rest of the top 25 fastest-growing political-adjacent channels last quarter:

A few major political channels actually lost more subscribers than they gained last quarter. Right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro shed another 50,000 subscribers from his channel since July, and his outlet, The Daily Wire, lost 10,000 subscribers from its main channel. Problematic conservative comedian Russell Brand also saw a major loss of subscribers, dropping over 40,000. 

One other major change on YouTube this quarter is reshaping how I track the platform. In August, YouTube announced it would immediately change the formula it uses to calculate public view counts. Until then, a "view" meant at least 30 seconds of watch time. Now it means a single impression, so creators will see bigger view counts listed on their videos, but those views will be far lower quality. YouTubers still get the more meaningful watch-time data on the backend, but those stats aren't public, and all I can see is the inflated impressions figure. For that reason, I won't be building charts based on view counts anymore, though you can still find the raw numbers in the dashboard.

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