by Tom Webster
A look at how podcast consumers feel about politics in podcasting as the midterm approaches.
The midterms are coming up in just a few weeks, so a lot of politicians are about to show up on a lot of podcasts, and in the 2026 wave of The Podcast Landscape we asked 5,473 Americans what they think about that. This special report is the politics chapter of the study, and because it’s the second year we’ve asked, we can tell you for the first time what moved and what didn’t.
Some of you know that in my previous role at Edison Research, I had the opportunity to work on the exit polls for what was called the National Election Pool (a consortium of major news networks), and I spent a lot of that time looking at a lot of tiny numbers in a lot of precincts around the country. In the 2024 election, which many called “the podcast election,” I was admittedly a bit skeptical about the import of podcasting’s role in the outcome. Trump got about the same vote that he did in 2020 really, so the outcome for the Presidential election was more about how many people who voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t vote for Harris in 2024. There are a lot of variables in election turnout, and while podcasts were probably one of them, it left an open question in my mind - just how much of an impact do they really have in the minds of voters? Luckily, surveys are my hammer and everything is a nail, so here we go.
First, one thing that we can say with reasonable certainty is that the podcast audience doesn’t really differ substantively from the rest of the country in terms of party, though there are slight ideological leans. Compare each political group’s share of monthly consumers (people who have consumed a podcast in the past 30 days) with its share of US adults, and Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all land at an index of 102, where 100 means the podcast audience looks exactly like the country. There is a small lean by ideology that you won’t find by party: liberals index at 109, moderates at 96, and conservatives at 102. It shows up in weekly consumption too, where 46% of liberals consumed a podcast in the past week against 36% of moderates and 38% of conservatives, a gap larger than the margin of error of about three points. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are within three points of one another, and the party balance held from 2025, while none of the weekly rates changed significantly.
On the question of whether politicians belong on podcasts at all, 48% of US adults say it’s appropriate, 39% say it’s neither appropriate nor inappropriate, and 10% say it’s inappropriate. Republicans (55%) and Democrats (53%) give essentially the same answer, and neither group moved significantly from 2025. Independents (42%) and moderates (40%) are lower, but they mostly choose “neither” over “inappropriate.” People differ by how much they consume:
The changes among weekly consumers, monthly consumers, and never-consumers are significant; lapsed consumers and all adults moved within the margin of error. Among political-talk consumers, 74% say it’s appropriate, the same as the 75% in 2025, which is the audience research equivalent of discovering that people who eat at the restaurant tend to like the restaurant. Podcasting’s regulars warmed to politicians as guests while the people who have never consumed a podcast cooled, so the distance between weekly consumers and never-consumers grew from 29 points to 38. The difference is podcast use, not party.
The people booking the guests will want to know whether an appearance changes anyone’s mind. We asked all adults whether a politician’s podcast appearance could affect how they vote this November, and the graph below shows the answers from likely midterm voters, the 73% of adults who say they will definitely or probably vote (the rest of each row is people who weren’t sure or gave another answer).
An appearance helps more than twice as often as it hurts, and weekly consumers are the group most open to it, since only 28% of them rule out any effect. It doesn’t favor a party, either. Among likely midterm voters, 21% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats say an appearance would make them more likely to vote for the politician, while Independents are hardest to move at 11%, with 34% of them saying the effects would be mixed. We asked 2024 voters a different version of this question last year, whether a podcast appearance had affected their vote on Election Day 2024, and 17% of the monthly consumers among them said more likely and 6% less likely. That question looked backward and this year’s looks forward, so please don’t line the two up as a trend (I know you want to).
The genre itself is where you’d expect a midterm bump, and we didn’t find one. In 2026, 27% of monthly consumers consumed political talk in the past 30 days, down from 31% in 2025, a decline, and the genre has gone from second place to fifth, behind comedy, true crime, sports, and news. News held at 30% both years. Political talk still reaches roughly 15% of US adults, and the dip appears in every group we can measure, though it’s significant only among conservatives (37% to 32%) and Democrats (33% to 28%).
The audience for political talk is as evenly split by party as it was last year, at 36% Democrats and 35% Republicans, with Independents at 21%, and none of those moved significantly. The share of political-talk consumers who say they’re very conservative rose from 17% to 23%, the only significant change in the audience’s makeup. Very conservative adults are a larger share of podcast consumers than a year ago, at 16% of monthly consumers, up from 12%, while they went from 13% to 15% of US adults. They also held within the margin of error in political talk, going from 43% to 39%, while all other monthly consumers fell significantly from 29% to 24%.
Before anyone repeats these numbers at a dinner party, remember that every figure about votes is what people say they would do. A voter predisposed to like a candidate may also be the voter who’s happy to see that candidate on a podcast, which would put the 26% in the weekly row for reasons that have nothing to do with the microphone. The group most open to an appearance is also the group already here, because the never-consumers are the one group that grew less accepting of politicians on podcasts, and only 26% of them find news or political analysis interesting as a benefit of the medium (28% in 2025, not a significant change).
For anyone booking a candidate, your audience is more welcoming than the public at large, with 60% of monthly consumers and 74% of political-talk consumers calling it appropriate against 48% of all adults. For anyone weighing the audience for political talk, the party mix is 36% Democrats, 35% Republicans, and 21% Independents, and the one thing that moved is ideology.
I can’t tell you whether a podcast appearance will change a single vote in November, and nothing in this study could. I can tell you that 18% of likely midterm voters say it would make them more likely to vote for the politician, that 8% say less likely, and that the 18% come from every party.
Thank you to the wonderful sponsors of The Podcast Landscape 2026: American Public Media, BetterHelp, NPR, ESPN Podcasts, SiriusXM, and DAX, as well as our research partners at Signal Hill Insights. The Podcast Landscape 2026 comprises a sample of 5,473 US adults, 18 years of age and older, weighted to the US Census to represent the US population.
