New data: The biggest political & news publications on Substack

Last Summer, I published a brief analysis of the partisan lean of major political Substack publications, concluding that the largest political voices on the platform overwhelmingly skewed progressive. Especially as Elon Musk enshittified the app formerly known as Twitter, anti-Trump opinionators and grassroots resistance libs built a whole ecosystem on Substack, with publishers collaborating via Live Videos and using the platform’s powerful “recommendations” feature to grow each other’s audience. At the time, I concluded that Substack had become "liberal's answer to Musk's X."

A year later, I wanted to check back in. Has that trend shifted? How much have political publications grown over the past 12 months? Are conservatives finally moving to Substack?

To find out, I pulled subscriber data for 100 publications that self-identified in the "U.S. Politics" category, plus another 100 in the platform’s "News" category. Then I built an interactive dashboard showing the estimated partisan lean of the largest and most influential Substack publications in both of those categories. You can sort and filter by paid or total email subscribers, and organize them by their partisan lean (though I'll admit, some categorizations are subjective):