The popular program “The Joe Rogan Experience” has gradually transformed from a comedy podcast into a highly influential platform with real-world political weight. A pair of new studies reveals that listenership of the show strongly predicts voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, even after accounting for past voting habits. These results were published as a recent preprint in APSA Preprints.
The media landscape has fractured over the past two decades in the shadow of the contemporary internet. Audiences now choose from an immense variety of channels, allowing entertainment programming to emerge as a prominent vehicle for political messaging. Shows that traditionally focused on comedy or culture now routinely include policy issues in their scripts, blurring the lines between standard news and entertainment content.
By embedding political concepts into casual conversations, these hybrid programs reach people who might otherwise ignore civic participation. Researchers refer to the expansion of politics into everyday culture as a state of total politics. When apolitical spaces become inundated with policy messages, audiences encounter civic discourse without actively seeking it out.
Modern podcasts operate differently than traditional television or print media. The format allows hosts to foster strong, one-sided relationships with their audience through informal storytelling and a sense of unscripted authenticity. Because listeners feel a personal connection to the host, they often build deep trust and reduce their natural skepticism toward persuasive messages.
Huma Rasheed, a communication researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and a team of collaborators wanted to examine how this politicization unfolds within a major cultural property. They chose to study “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a podcast that reaches tens of millions of listeners. While the show originated as a lighthearted comedy podcast, it eventually became a routine subject of conversation in the context of national elections.
The podcast revolves around unscripted interviews where the host speaks with guests ranging from tech billionaires like Elon Musk to astrophysicists and heavyweight boxers. In late 2024, the host interviewed Donald Trump and publicly endorsed him on the eve of the election. Political commentators suggested this appearance gave the political campaign momentum to engage younger demographics and undecided voters in swing states.
To map the thematic evolution of the program, Rasheed and her team gathered a nearly complete collection of episode transcripts. They collected the text from 2,175 episodes broadcast between December 2009 and December 2024. Analyzing such an immense volume of text manually is impossible, so the researchers applied computational text models to identify recurring patterns.
The team used an algorithm that groups words into semantic themes to find forty-five distinct topics throughout the history of the show. The researchers then mapped the relationships between these topics to see which subjects frequently appeared together in the same conversations. This structural mapping allowed them to identify six major thematic domains within the podcast.
The computational approach sorted the show’s content into clusters regarding personal narratives, social and political issues, comedy, fitness and combat sports, conspiracy theories, and wildlife. When looking at how these themes interacted with one another, personal storytelling served as the structural center of the program. Intimate accounts of family life, childhood experiences, and career trajectories acted as narrative bridges linking wildly different subject areas.
This narrative anchor helps facilitate smooth transitions across unscripted conversations that routinely extend well past the two-hour mark. The researchers then tracked how the prevalence of these themes changed over the fifteen-year lifespan of the show. Topics related to crude humor and sexual jokes experienced a steady decline.
Alternatively, discussions regarding social and political issues steadily rose in prominence over the years. Conversations centered on elections, foreign policy, and free speech saw a marked increase beginning around 2016. This change shifted the tone of the show from stereotypical locker room talk to substantive debates about current events.
In the realm of health and medicine, the algorithms inductively grouped conversations about vaccines into the fitness cluster. This placement suggests the podcast framed medical discussions in terms of athletic performance and physical fitness rather than public health policy. This framing matched the host’s previous commentary suggesting that highly fit individuals did not need certain medical interventions.
The researchers also identified a cluster related to altered states and speculative science. This domain included discussions about psychedelics, theoretical physics, ancient civilizations, and space exploration. While conversations about fringe theories and extraterrestrials dipped initially, they garnered a steady increase in popularity on the program after 2016.
After establishing this thematic shift toward serious civic issues, the research team wanted to see if listening to the program correlated with real-world political behavior. They utilized data from a nationally representative survey of 1,600 adults in the United States conducted in early 2025. The survey questioned participants regarding their media consumption habits, demographic background, political leanings, and past voting choices.
Nearly ten percent of the sample reported listening to the podcast at least occasionally. The listener base skewed heavily male, with more than seventy percent of the audience identifying as men. To isolate the specific correlation with the podcast, the researchers mathematically controlled for a wide array of alternative factors.
They accounted for age, income, education, and general interest in government affairs. They also factored in whether the participant regularly consumed specific media, including the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, national newspapers, or social media platforms. The researchers additionally controlled for party identification and whether the individual voted for Trump in the 2020 election.
Even with these extensive controls in place, tuning into the podcast emerged as a strong predictor of voting for Trump in the 2024 election. The listening habit stood out as the second strongest numeric predictor in their model, trailing only a past vote for the same candidate in 2020. The podcast proved exceptionally predictive compared to traditional political variables like basic party affiliation.
The researchers noted that qualitative anecdotes mirror their quantitative findings. Following the election, focus groups with young voters highlighted how the unscripted audio format shaped perceptions of candidates. Several undecided participants told reporters that the three-hour informal interview made the candidate seem normal and authentic.
It should be noted that the research was published as a preprint. This means the paper has not yet undergone formal peer review—a rigorous process where independent experts evaluate the methodology and conclusions before official publication—so its results should be considered preliminary.
The study authors also note some limitations to their survey design. The data cannot prove that listening to the podcast directly caused individuals to change their voting habits. Unmeasured cultural or psychological factors might drive someone to both listen to the podcast and vote conservatively.
Establishing a direct chain of influence would require specialized experimental setups or tracking the exact same individuals over several years. Future studies might explore the psychological mechanisms that make long-format audio interviews persuasive. Identifying the specific audio features that foster a sense of trust could explain how non-traditional media bypasses typical audience skepticism.
These findings suggest that massive cultural platforms now dictate their own terms of civic engagement. In the past, politicians shaped traditional journalism simply by acting on the public stage. Now, political figures increasingly accommodate the informal style and rules of popular entertainment programs to access vast, unengaged segments of the electorate.
The study, “From Punchlines to Politics: The Joe Rogan Experience as a Case Study of the Politicization of Apolitical Spaces in the U.S.,” was authored by Huma Rasheed, Liam Cuddy, Brooke Molokach, Jiwon Nam, Scarlett Feuerstein, R. Lance Holbert, and Dannagal G. Young.
