Why presidential candidates are embracing podcast interviews

Vice President Kamala Harris sat for her first interview on Fox News Wednesday as the Democratic presidential candidate continued her media blitz ahead of the November election.

And while it’s generating plenty of headlines, these kinds of big interviews just don’t hold the power they used to, according to Nick Quah, a podcast and culture critic at New York Magazine who’s been following the candidates’ interviews on the alternative media circuit.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Quah about how Kamala Harris’ appearance on more internet-native shows like the podcast “Call Her Daddy” or Donald Trump’s appearances on various “bro-centric” shows like Logan Paul ‘sYouTube channel represent a notable media shift compared to previous elections.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation

Nick Quah: It’s a shift in the sense that we’re seeing more of it and in a related sense, both candidates seem to be participating in the “traditional” media ecosystem, a little less, or a little later than traditionally expected, right? And for several reasons, the chief of which is the abnormality of this particular race, right? The Harris campaign is about 100 days old, and the Trump campaign is very regular for many, in many respects. We have sort of arrived at a place in which, it doesn’t just feel like these “non-traditional” media spaces are on equal footing with traditional newspapers and TV networks. In some sense, you can even kind of start seeing it as a little bit having more emphasis, and that is the shift.

Meghan McCarty Carino: Well, let’s focus in on Kamala Harris’ media appearances recently, because she’s done kind of a spree of them in the last month or so. When we’re talking about non-traditional media, probably the most notable among them was the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. This is kind of a frank, sex and relationship advice and comedy show. Here’s a clip from that where host Alex Cooper asks Harris about some recent comments from Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

McCarty Carino: All right, the two of them also kind of got into a lot of issues directly affecting women, which is the major audience for that show. It’s the most popular podcast for women. You know, they talked about abortion, reproductive rights. Some called it pretty tame for that show, but there were a lot of other people kind of chiming in to say that there weren’t enough journalistic pushback questions, kind of challenging questions for Harris. I mean, what did you make of that interview?

Quah: Right, it’s a softball, right? It’s a pure softball conversation. And, you know, sort of the history of that show, it’s a largely accommodating show. It kind of focuses on the celebrities of the circuit, and it, you know, largely is themed around sex and relationships, but at the same time like this is, like, in what universe are we considering this a journalistic platform? But with that particular appearance, they’re going to audiences that are phrased by some as “low information voters” or “news avoiders,” right? The sort of 30,000-foot environment that we kind of exist in right now is one in which media is deeply fragmented. You know, related to this is sort of the decline and trust in news institutions in America, and also just the sort of decline of the news business as a business in general in the United States. And so the voting public is no longer clustered around a few major media sources, a few major news sources even. And they’re mostly distributed, and they’re primarily distributed in these “non-traditional” platforms like podcasts and YouTube and Twitch. And so with this appearance, you can sort of see the logic of the campaign, it’s that they’re trained to get in front of the wide swath of women who listen to this show, which is not a monolith block. They are composed of different kinds of women, distributed in different parts of the country, and the hope there is to get her in in front of enough people that she could maybe change some minds in terms of actually getting out the vote or changing the vote, to vote for her.

McCarty Carino: You also wrote about a couple other Harris appearances in this kind of non-traditional ecosystem. She went on “All The Smoke,” which is a basketball podcast. She sat with Howard Stern. What do you think Harris’ campaign is hoping to do with these appearances?

Quah: So it depends on the show, in the same way that it differs in the way that when she campaigns in Pennsylvania, for example, it’s a little different when she, you know, goes to take up a political engagement in California. She’s getting in front of blocks of voters that her campaign feels that they need to get in front of and shore up their support from. She did a live audio town hall with Charlamagne tha God, who is a prominent New York-based radio broadcaster, also a podcaster. And with those appearances, you know, she’s explicitly trying to sort of shore up her support among black men who are thought to be and have been, sort of recorded as major sort of constituencies who listen to these shows, who listen to these podcasts and sort of programs. And so, you know, the way that I sort of think about these appearances and think about these shows is that, they’re a little closer to the way that you think about a candidate going to, say, a church, right, in the community and going, I am appealing to this congregation. I’m appealing to this constituency, and the pastor — in this case, podcaster — is someone who kind of channels their sort of community shape, and also channels their sort of interests and anxieties in that conversation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the podcaster conducts it in a journalistic manner, but they do represent the interests of their listenership in general, and that is a subtle but actually quite a notable distinction.

McCarty Carino: All right, now let’s talk about Donald Trump’s appearances with non-traditional media, of which there have been many. Probably one of the kind of best known on the internet was one that he an interview he did with Theo Von. His show is called “This Past Weekend,” which kind of went viral.

McCarty Carino: They also talked about opioid addiction, you know, pharmaceutical companies, how Trump had kind of learned a lot about hard drug abuse from Theo Von, who talks about his sobriety, his past, kind of using cocaine. I mean, what did you take away from this interview? Why do you think it went so viral?

Quah: That was maybe, you know, a genuinely new moment, strangely? Like, it’s a first time in a very long time that we’ve had kind of a human, sort of look into this person who has become largely like larger than life and a bit of a caricature, very much so of his own sort of volition. And I think it went viral because of that sort of strangeness, right? But the way it fits into how one should think about what exactly the Trump campaign is doing with all of these podcast experiences, it’s a little different from the Harris sort of strategy, in a sense that for some months now he’s been making somewhat routine appearances on these like “bro-y” podcasts. So the New York Times and Atlanta kind of dubbed it the “Manoverse.” They’re not necessarily right wing, they’re not necessarily libertarian, but they’re sort of “just for the lulz” kind of chaos. They’re also comedians, they’re often YouTubers, just these boys who are hosting these really popular shows that are consumed by large numbers of what are believed to be, you know, younger white men. It’s essentially the Trump base. And so on the one hand, it is shoring up support or just deepening the relationship with that constituency. But part of it’s also, you know, Trump is going to spaces that he feels comfortable in, and a lot of these interviews are just like vibes. It really feels more like, oh, he’s just just hanging out and sort of sucking the popularity from the room. You know, not too different from how he kind of handles his rallies and campaign stops.

McCarty Carino: How much of this strategy do you think is, you know, the campaigns trying to go after maybe a younger, more digital audience? Kind of less overtly politically attached audiences versus just this idea you write about, about kind of stress-free conversations? You know, just going after celebrity endorsements and softball interviews?

Quah: I mean, it’s very much a mixture, a pure mixture of both, right? First of all, if you just kind of look at it from their perspective, the strategic logic of like, there is less upside truly to engage with the news media, largely because the audience behind the news media, I would assume that in their thinking, has already been accounted for. These are already audiences and voters who either have made up their mind or are now like combing with a fine tooth the policy positions and the real substantive stuff. The hope here with these non traditional appearances, is to try to win at the margins, to try to get out people who otherwise would not have voted, to get out people who probably otherwise were not exposed to the candidates in some shape or form, maybe because these are folks who are avoiding news. Maybe these are just folks who have, like, three day jobs, and they just do not have the energy and time to sort of dig into the news, and, you know, spend more time listening to podcasts. And so the intent is exposure, and to the extent that which these are softball spaces, right? Like, that’s also a question to be asked, rightfully so of the podcasters themselves, right? Like, it is a thing that I have sort of raised in the past, in particular the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” [in] that she does a lot of these major celebrity interviews. She rarely presses them for anything that’s particularly difficult or sensitive, and yet still accumulates an audience, and an audience is valuable to these campaigns.

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