Paul Riismandel
I was talking with Signal Hill Insights founder Jeff Vidler the other day. He’s a bit of a politics junkie and has been following the shifting party allegiances of the US monthly podcast audience in the Demos+ study we conduct with Triton Digital, surveying 3,000+ monthly podcast consumers every calendar quarter. He noticed some shifts that are particularly interesting with the 2026 US mid-term election happening in just a couple weeks. I thought we should share what we’re seeing.
An Eroding Democratic Skew
A notable shift happened in the US podcast audience last year. Looking at political party affiliation for the 2025 calendar year, the audience evenly split into thirds for the first time: 33% identified as Democrat, 33% as Republican, and 33% as Independent. The “Independent” segment includes respondents who identify as either “Independent,” “Republican-leaning” or “Democrat-leaning.”
This was somewhat different than the 2025 figures among the general population. According to Gallup the largest share – 45% – identified as Independent. But, like the podcast audience, the remainder was essentially split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, at 27% and 26%, respectively.
What stands out among monthly podcast consumers is that 2025 represented the lowest percentage of identified Democrats since Demos+ first asked the question in 2022. Then, during the previous mid-term election year, 39% identified as Democrat, strongly overindexing (139) the general population, with 28% saying they were Democrats.
From 2022 to 2025, we observed a decline of 6 points in the share of the podcast audience identifying as Democrat. At the same time, we saw a proportional gain in the share identifying as Republican, growing 7 points from 26% to 33%. The Independent share nudged down just a little, from 35% to 33%.
The trend holds if we take the leaners out of the Independent bucket, grouping those who say they lean Republican into the Republican bucket, and doing the same with those leaning Democrat. Applying that grouping, identified Democrats and Democrat leaners made up 48% of the podcast audience in 2022, while only 34% identified as Republican or leaning Republican. By 2025 the split was nearly equal, with 41% going Republican and 42% going Democrat.
Interestingly, the overall adult population measured by Gallup still tilted Democrat in 2025 at 47%, with Republican identifiers and leaners making up 43%. The leaners accounted for the Democrat tilt. An equal share strictly identified with either party, but 20% said they lean Democrat while 16% lean Republican. By comparison, in 2022 a nearly equal proportion of adults said they lean Republican or Democrat, at 17% and 16%, respectively.
The Podcast Audience Shifting to Mirror the Gen Pop
So, what happened to even out the share of Democrats and Republicans in the podcast audience?
One factor is growth. According to the Infinite Dial, in 2022 38% of Americans aged 12+ listened to a podcast in the last month, a number that jumped to 48% by 2025. In raw numbers 29 million more people listened to at least one podcast in a month in 2025 than 2022. Arguably, a lot of these new folks identified as Republican, tipping the scales.
The next question is, why did this happen?
Again, it’s difficult to provide a single causal factor, but a likely factor was content, and discovery. That is, there started to be more podcasts appealing to people identifying to or leaning Republican, and more Republicans started to discover podcasts. As I noted last year in an analysis of the shift in the news podcast audience, in the second quarter of 2025 Republicans made up 47% of those who had started listening to podcasts in the last six months, compared to only 27% identifying as Democrat.
Keep in mind that the earlier Democratic skew of the podcast audience was out-of-step with the US population. The shift towards an equal split of identified Democrats and Republicans serves as an indicator that the podcast audience is looking more like the overall population – a phenomenon I’ve observed before – even if podcast listeners are more likely to declare a party affiliation than the overall average.
Podcasting’s Political Picture in 2026
What about today?
Looking at Demos+ data from the third quarter of 2026 we see that the share of monthly podcast listeners identifying as Democrats remains stable year-over-year at 33%. The share identifying as Republican, however, has moved down four points to 29%, resulting in an increase of Independents to 39%. The Independent share has crept up through the year from 36% in Q1, as the Republican share has dropped a bit from 31% in the first quarter.
Again, this more closely aligns with Gallup results among US adults in general. In the third quarter 30% of US adults identified as Democrats, while a quarter are Republican and 45% say they’re Independent. Once skewing Democratic just four years ago, the podcast audience now skews Independent, just as the general population does.
However, if we remove the party leaners from the Independent bucket, we actually find that the podcast audience now has a smaller share of people aligning with the Democrats – 44% – than the general population which now stands at 50%. Pure Independents who express no party lean account for this gap, constituting 20% of monthly podcast consumers, nearly double the share of adults overall at 11%.
Things are closer on the GOP side where 39% of US adults lean or identify as Republican, compared to 37% of podcast consumers.
Another “Podcast Election” for the 2026 US Mid-Terms?
Many observers called the 2024 Presidential election the “podcast election,” due to Donald Trump’s many unscripted, long form podcast interviews, which were more numerous and seemed less constrained than his opponent’s. Though there’s no way to definitively prove the weight of podcasts, in the 2025 Voxtopica / Signal Hill Insights study “The Podcast Influence”, half of podcast consumers who were also registered voters said podcasts had at least some influence on their 2024 vote. The effect was more pronounced among Republican voters – 54% reported this influence, compared to 45% of Democrats.
Will 2026 be another “podcast election?” Frankly, it’s a harder analysis to make with a mid-term election. It’s much easier to track appearances by two major party presidential candidates than the candidates for the 470 Congressional seats up for grabs next month.
While four years ago the podcast audience firmly skewed more Democrat than the general population, today we can say more people who identify as Republican or Independent are consuming podcasts. We can also say that the difference in party affiliation and affinity among podcast consumers in 2026 more closely reflects the shifts in the US adult population.
And there is evidence that podcasts have an influence. In our study with Voxtopica 63% of registered voter listeners agreed that, “podcasts change my opinions on issues or topics in the news.” The latest edition of The Podcast Landscape finds that one-in-four likely voters who consume podcasts say a candidate’s podcast appearance could make them more likely to vote for that candidate. However – especially because the largest share is uncommitted independents – it’s less clear if that will work more strongly to one party’s advantage.
*Note that I deliberately said, “listened.” That’s because the Infinite Dial only added podcast watching in 2025, which added 8% more consumers who only watched a podcast, bringing the total consumer base to 55% of the US. But in order to keep the comparison apples-to-apples, I’m only using the listening number here.
