Liberals are gaining ground on political YouTube. Can it last?

For more than a year, I've been tracking the political content ecosystem on YouTube, cataloging the personalities, brands, and channels that are fast-emerging or quietly punching above their weight. Every quarter, the partisan dynamics shift in ways that reveal something crucial about where Americans are actually getting their political information. This quarter was no different, except for one key detail: progressives are finally gaining real momentum on a platform that the right has dominated for years.

After analyzing data from over 400 partisan-leaning, political and political-adjacent channels, the past 90 days paint a pretty striking picture. Liberal and left-leaning political channels saw significantly more growth and accumulated more video views than their conservative counterparts. It's a sign that the left's decade-long struggle to build infrastructure on digital platforms might finally be yielding results, even if the overall YouTube landscape still favors the right.

Largest by subscribers

Looking at the 100 largest political & political-adjacent YouTube channels by subscribers, 36 are liberal-leaning, while 64 are right-leaning. Out of those 100, the right-leaning channels have a cumulative subscriber base of 251.6 million, versus 151.7 million for the left-leaning channels. Here are the largest…