Presidential Podcast Punches Up

After weeks of condemning Kamala Harris for not doing media interviews, Donald Trump’s surrogates and outriders are suitably outraged as Harris and Walz unleash their media strategy on a podcast instead of traditional media.

While Harris has appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes and social media is awash with clips of ABC News’s massive daytime show, The View (think Loose Women on steroids), and sharing a beer on The Late Show with host Stephen Colbert, it is her choice of launching on the Call Her Daddy podcast that has the Trump campaign in a panic.

Call Her Daddy is the number one-rated show on Apple and number five on Spotify, regularly netting five million listeners. It’s been consciously apolitical up to this point, with a diet of relationship and sex advice with listener-generated content described as ‘raunchy’ or ‘taboo.’

Its audience is younger, professionally educated women—the ‘suburban moms’ who were so crucial to the Biden victory in 2020. With reproductive rights a key battleground this time around, women are again likely to hold the keys to the White House.

Reshaping the media landscape and political battleground

But the salient point here is the choice of a podcast to launch the media campaign over traditional print and broadcast media and what it says about the growth of podcasts and their role in reshaping the media landscape and political battleground.

For PRs and the advertising industry, it’s made life a hell of a lot easier in terms of understanding where your audience is and the content they want. For celebrities, and increasingly politicians, it offers an opportunity to reach a mass segmented audience on sites that are more trusted than network news channels. There’s also the aura effect of being associated with podcasters and influencers, like Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, who recently signed a $125 million deal with a new distribution partner, and the opportunity to appear on platforms that deliver engagement and authenticity.

This mirrors the recent trend of celebrity brands sidestepping traditional media with their own documentary content, using high production values and delivered in partnership with global platforms like Netflix— think the Sussexes, the Beckhams, and Robbie Williams—who want control over their own narrative.

It’s reasonable to assume that this is part of the attraction for politicians. They know they won’t get the same level of scrutiny and questioning from Alex Cooper that you might expect from CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Hot take

Critics argue that this type of media strategy undermines the electorate’s ability to fully assess a candidate on policy positions, as it replaces substantive debate with personality-driven and lifestyle content that could overshadow important issues that affect voters’ lives. This might not matter too much if the issue is Robbie William’s demons, but it does if he’s applying for a job with access to the nuclear codes.

The other downside is the impact this will have on public accountability. By focusing on platforms that are more trusted but less demanding, politicians can boost their poll numbers while avoiding critical questioning. This erodes the ability of journalists to hold power to account and build in some sort of transparency to the electoral cycle. Where will it all end? We don’t know yet, but in a dystopian future, we may end up renaming CBS’s 60 Minutes to 47.2 Seconds because that’s the average length of a TikTok video.