Following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, many commentators credited podcasts with contributing to Donald Trump’s victory. On election night, the Trump campaign openly thanked a handful of podcast hosts, including the Nelk Boys, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys, and Joe Rogan, for helping to shape voter sentiment. This acknowledgment and Trump’s success at the polls have crystallized a view of podcasts as crucial venues for political persuasion. To many observers, the big question after last year’s election was whether Democrats could replicate a similar media strategy by finding a “Joe Rogan of the left.”
As it turns out, that might be easier to do than anyone thought. Our analysis shows that discussions on Joe Rogan’s podcasts spanned a wide range of ideological views. These podcasts were surprisingly balanced across the political spectrum, with roughly as many left-leaning as right-leaning episodes as measured by the content of the discussions. Our findings challenge popular media portrayals of these podcasts as being exclusively MAGA (Make American Great Again) aligned. In fact, we argue that Joe Rogan himself is not just “Joe Rogan of the right.” The strength of Trump’s campaign strategy may not have been his appearances on podcasts that featured exclusively conservative content, but rather going on podcasts that featured a variety of viewpoints.
How we did our research
We examined 30,000 podcast transcripts, representing the complete set of podcasts in 2024 from 274 of the most popular podcasts in the U.S., as identified by Listen Notes and Edison Podcast Research. The snapshot of results we present here comes from six of the more popular shows that featured a Trump interview: Bussin’ with the Boys, Flagrant, Full Send, Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, and This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von. Most of these shows are entertainment-oriented, with little political discussion, on average. Bussin’ with the Boys, for example, focuses on football, while Lex Fridman mostly covers topics relating to science and technology. These spaces represent an example of incidental political exposure, where discussion of politics shows up in entertainment settings that reach large audiences. In these spaces, hosts and guests generally engage in humor, commentaries on culture, and everyday conversation rather than traditional news or political debate.
We break each episode into what each speaker says, identify if any of those statements are about politics, score those statements for ideology, and then combine scores into an overall ideological lean for that episode.
This work utilized Google’s Gemini, a large language model. In querying Gemini to analyze the transcripts, we defined ideology using a traditional conception of ideological conservatism and liberalism. When we examined speaker statements Gemini labeled as “liberal,” these statements emphasized topics such as social equality, government intervention in the economy, and progressive social change. Statements Gemini labeled as “conservative,” in turn, emphasized individual responsibility, limited government, traditional social values, and national security.
A team of research assistants then validated these scores by rating a subset of the speaker statements Gemini scored, and comparing the labels from the AI model to the human coders. We include statements from both the host and the guests in the overall score in order to characterize each episode as a whole. Our scoring system ranged from strongly liberal (- 3) to strongly conservative (3). After scoring each statement, we then aggregated them to obtain an ideology score for each episode.
Gauging ideology in podcast transcripts
In the figure below, the dashed vertical line marks each show’s average ideology score across episodes, while the solid line at zero on the X-axis indicates a moderate position. Negative scores to the left of zero reflect a liberal lean, while positive scores represent a conservative lean. We found that for many of the shows Trump appeared on, such as The Joe Rogan Experience, Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant, This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, and Lex Fridman, the average ideological score across 2024 episodes leaned liberal. Bussin’ with the Boys and the Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast, in contrast, registered as more conservative. Importantly, these ideological signals emerged even when politics made up a relatively small share of the discussion. In podcasts in nonpolitical genres, political content can be found in up to about 4% of the total speaker statements, which varied in length.
This means that, for example, across all Joe Rogan podcast episodes in 2024, the majority of the episodes were labeled as left-of-center. That result could be surprising to some, but it reflects both Rogan’s own comments and the political content his guests introduced.
How ideology shows up in these podcasts
In some cases, the liberal lean makes sense given the guest. One example is Episode #2222 with Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.). While his liberal record has at times been contested, in the episode Fetterman describes issues like local income inequality, which helped motivate his decision to run for office. This discussion, in turn, shaped the overall ideology score for that particular podcast episode. Other liberal-leaning episodes come from moments where Rogan and his guests discuss issues such as health care, the cost of living, or social policy. In Episode #2297 with Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin, comedians and hosts of the TriggerNometry podcast, Rogan and his guests talked about the ”Free Luigi” movement, the crisis of medical bankruptcy, and other issues with the U.S. health care system. Rogan commented, “It seems like if there is one thing we should do for everybody, it’s health care,” a comment that nudges the episode’s overall ideological signal to the left.
Some episodes leaned liberal even when the guest did not identify with either political party. One example is in Episode #2179 with Bridget Phetasy, a comedian and host of the Walk-Ins Welcome podcast. In this episode, Phetasy and Rogan discussed polarization, acknowledging that there are ideas on both sides of the ideological spectrum with which they agree. Specifically, Rogan and Phetasy each discuss welfare and the importance of ensuring that no American goes hungry. A similar pattern emerges in Episode #2139 with Akaash Singh, where Rogan states, “This is coming from someone who’s been mostly liberal their whole life, with most issues.” Rogan goes on to talk about topics such as red-lining, mass incarceration of Black men, and issues raised in other podcasts with figures involved in criminal justice reform.
These stand in contrast to more explicitly conservative episodes from 2024, such as Episode #2115 with Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer turned prominent anti-trans activist. Another example: Episode #2133 with Brendan O’Neil, a British conservative commentator and author of Anti-Woke and A Duty to Offend.
As a reminder, the vast majority of podcast episodes, even when they included political remarks, were not primarily about politics. Many ideological scores are driven by a relatively small number of statements embedded within otherwise lengthy nonpolitical conversations. This reflects the dynamics of incidental exposure, where political cues emerge in spaces that are not explicitly political. This analysis is not in any way meant to diminish the significance of Rogan’s 2024 endorsement of Donald Trump. Instead, our findings highlight the complexity of the informational environment Rogan’s audience routinely encounters, which includes both liberal and conservative cues rather than uniformly conservative content.
How ideology scores varied in 2024
Plotting each episode for these shows over time reveals clusters of conservative episodes around the election. Yet the figure below suggests most of these podcasts remained fairly ideologically balanced over time, with episodes featuring discussions that leaned both conservative and liberal. The overall stability of each show’s ideological tone over time is an indicator that these podcasts are not consistently partisan outlets. Instead, these podcasts maintained a relatively balanced mix of content across 2024.
Despite his endorsement of Donald Trump, Joe Rogan – like many other podcasters who hosted Trump during the 2024 campaign season – appears to present a relatively balanced set of political views across episodes of his show. From this perspective, the Joe Rogan of the left may just be… Joe Rogan. This is a podcast that spans the left, the center, and the right of the U.S. political spectrum. Rather than looking for “Joe Rogan of the left,” Democrats might take a lesson and look for discussion spaces featuring viewpoints from across the ideological spectrum.
Melina Much is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University and a Siegel Research Fellow.
Kylan Rutherford is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University and a research fellow at Civic Health Project.
Jonathan Nagler is professor of politics and co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.
Joshua A. Tucker is Julius Silver Professor, professor of politics, director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, and co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.
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