The year Democrats pivoted to audio

Democrats are in the political wilderness, and many of the party’s top leaders and rising stars have spent the past year trying to talk their way out of it. 

At least in elite political circles, 2024 was widely seen as “the podcast election,” attributing informal, long-form conversations as key to Donald Trump’s success. This year, many Democrats took that lesson to heart - with communications directors and press secretaries aggressively pitching podcast producers to book their bosses for hours-long interviews.  

The result has been noteworthy: Twenty-one high-profile Democrats who have been floated as potential presidential candidates have made over 400 appearances on podcasts and YouTube shows since the start of the year. That’s according to Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich, who has listened to nearly every one of them and tracked his findings via a weekly newsletter, Nobody’s Listening. 

“I’m probably closing in on around 500 podcasts at this point…and that’s just counting appearances by the 20 or so Dems in my Big, Beautiful Tracker,” says Lehrich. “I think there’s a foundational fight unfolding over the form, function, and future of the Democratic Party, so I honestly just wanted to better understand the players. And the longer form, less buttoned-up interviews offer the best window into them. So I started mainlining thousands of hours of podcast hits, like the lamest junkie in history.”

Some of what has unfolded has been predictable—for example, the ever-ambitious Gavin Newsom has mastered the format, going on over 30 shows while hosting his own successful pod. Rahm Emanuel, who has been public about his presidential interest, has also been on a few dozen podcasts. Other trends have been more surprising. 

By far the most prolific politician to record podcast interviews this year was Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Congressman whose unique podcast strategy I covered several months ago. He was followed by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who each made around three dozen podcast appearances this year, including noteworthy hits on The Adam Friedland Show and FLAGRANT. One leading Democrat who noticeably stayed away from the podcast space was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sat down for just three podcast interviews in 2025—maintaining a relatively low profile while keeping her future political options open. 

Democrats’ repeated podcast outreach in 2025 has also shone a light on a new cohort of media power brokers on the Left, with some podcasts hosting multiple elected officials over and over again. By far the podcast that has booked the most potential 2028 contenders is Meidas Touch, which has recorded interviews with nearly all of them. Other major podcast stops for leading Democrats included Brian Tyler Cohen, Crooked’s Pod Save America, The David Pakman Show, and The Bulwark.

“[In a presidential primary] Individual podcast hosts in the progressive ecosystem will wield a ton of power – the Pod Save America guys, Tim Miller, Jennifer Welch, Ezra Klein, etc… They’re all bigger centers of gravity for Dems than any legacy media voices at this point, and how they portray candidates will matter a lot,” says Lehrich. “Those shows and other mainstays on the Democratic podcast circuit will be table stakes – like doing MSNBC and CNN. I fully expect some of them to end up hosting presidential debates or cattle calls, and campaigns to be launched exclusively on their pods.”

While the majority of appearances these Democrats made were with values-aligned hosts and mostly stayed away from difficult topics, they haven’t all been friendly. 

“Krystal Ball’s questioning of Elissa Slotkin on Breaking Points was one of the most hostile interviews I’ve ever seen,” Lehrich says. “And Rahm Emanuel really got eaten alive by I’ve Had It’s Jennifer Welch.”

Although the podcast format provides candidates with an outlet to show off their authentic selves, there also may be some risks to sitting down for dozens of hours of interviews, for example, giving future opponents fodder for attack ads. When New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill went on The Breakfast Club for an hour-long interview back in May, a verbal slip-up fueled her Republican rival’s attack ads portraying her as out of touch. While appearing on Pod Save America in August, Pete Buttigieg gave a train wreck of an answer to a question about Israel and Palestine, which he later had to clean up.  

“I do think we’re going to see more attack ads that weaponize clips from long-form podcasts – similar to the ones deployed against Aftyn Behn in TN-07 – but I still firmly believe Dems should be doing them,” Lehrich told me. “We’ve paid a steep electoral price for trying to ram a bunch of poll-tested, over-scripted career politicians down people’s throats. And the more exposure you have – the more voters feel like they know you – the less likely you are to be undone by any one misstep.”

To me, this moment feels like both an overdue shift and a bit of an overcorrection. Long-form interviews offer an intimacy most mediums in modern politics lack—but scaling those moments to reach beyond grassroots Democratic audiences is a tricky business. Besides, what works in the podcast studio won’t necessarily translate on the campaign trail in 2028. Still, for a party searching for its post-Biden identity, the podcast boom serves as a kind of rehearsal for how Democrats want to communicate in the next political era, and as operatives and candidates test-drive their messaging on the path to national relevance, more people than ever may be starting to tune in.

Read more of my past coverage of podcast politics in 2025:

According to a recent analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, the conservative “dark money ATM” DonorsTrust spent heavily on right-wing media efforts last year. The group made over $26 million in tax-deductible 501(c)(3) donations to conservative media organizations in 2024, a 20% increase from its partisan media giving in 2023. 

The nonprofits the group funded were affiliated with Reason, Turning Point USA, RealClearPolitics, the Daily Caller, PragerU, FDRLST Media, American Greatness, and the Epoch Times, among others. DonorsTrust also gave more than $3 million to the Lucy Burns Institute, which operates Ballotpedia, and $4.5 million to the Informing America Foundation, a significant funder of fake news outlets.

While Donors Trust may be the largest source of 501c3 funding for right-wing media efforts, dozens of other foundations, funds, and individuals provide million-dollar-plus contributions to these outlets each year.

One way many young people online have coped with the political chaos of 2025 is by creating and sharing a new wave of TikTok-specific resistance anthems — funny, original songs crafted in response to the news cycle. Some of this year’s biggest hits include the EDM remix of “Hostile Government Takeover,” and “Trump Is on the Epstein List,” a Billy Ray Cyrus-style country bop, which also has an 80’s synth variation. For those with a taste for darker humor, liberal TikTokers have ironically co-opted the cringey “We Are Charlie Kirk” song, turning it into a meme of its own.