President Trump and Vice President Harris are making plays for a critical voting demographic this year — young voters — by using podcast appearances rather than typical television news sit-down interviews to get their messages out. The appearances have allowed candidates to go deeper on issues and their own personal stories than a typical interview would allow, and the medium is giving them unique access to Gen Z and Millennial voters. 

Just in recent days, the two candidates combined have appeared on multiple podcasts. Ms. Harris sat down with Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” show to talk about her life story, her mother, reproductive rights, and the cost of living. She was able to talk at length about her housing, childcare, and tax cut agenda with a limited number of the typical “gotcha” questions for which candidates have had to prepare. 

Ms. Cooper’s show has rarely focused on politics, and more on issues related to women’s health and wellbeing, which Ms. Harris’s team felt was the perfect place to discuss what is at stake this year with respect to abortion rights. Ms. Cooper noted in a preamble to the interview that she had invited Trump to appear for his own hour-long sit down. 

Trump, too, has been making the podcast rounds. He sat for a 90-minute episode of comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast “FLAGRANT” on Wednesday, which according to the data site Listen Notes, is in the top 0.05 percent of most-listened to podcasts in the world. Trump’s own running mate, Senator Vance, sat for an interview with famous YouTubers, the Nelk Boys, for their podcast “Full Send” just days after he became the vice presidential nominee. The Nelk Boys have also invested tens of millions of dollars in getting their overwhelmingly young, male listeners to get out to vote this year. 

Trump in recent weeks also sat for interviews about personal finance and the economy with “the Ramsey Show,” foreign policy and the war in the Middle East with “the Ben Shapiro Show,” and to discuss policy with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade on his own show. 

While the reach may be large considering Trump’s appearance on “FLAGRANT” has already garnered 1.5 million views on YouTube, the podcasts don’t always provide the best opportunity to discuss policy, however, and can lead to some more viral moments for the campaigns. 

On Wednesday, Trump was laughed at by Mr. Schulz and his co-hosts for asserting he was a “basically truthful person” and that he has the tendency to ramble at his own campaign events. The most remembered moment from Mr. Vance’s appearance on “Full Send” seems to be his retelling of a story in which he told his young son to “shut the hell up” while he was on the phone with Trump. 

Podcasts are by far one of the most effective mediums to reach young people nowadays, rather than television news or interviews with large newspapers. During an interview with The New York Sun in early October, Robert Kennedy Jr. said that one of the main reasons his independent candidacy was viable was because of young people’s proclivity for getting their news from podcasts. 

“I ended up getting on the new media — these long form podcasts like ‘Joe Rogan’ and ‘Jordan Peterson,’” Mr. Kennedy said, likening his use of podcasts to his uncle, President Kennedy’s use of television in the 1960 campaign. “If you look at the people who were supporting me, I was beating President Trump and President Biden consistently among Americans under 35 years of age … by ten points, and I was beating them among independents because those are the people that listen to long form [podcast] interviews.”

According to Nielsen’s public data of news viewership by age, the average American spends about 216 minutes every week watching some kind of news program on their television. Younger voters are breaking from that sharply, however, choosing instead to get their news online or from podcasts. For those Americans between the ages of 18 and 34, they spend less than 130 minutes a week, on average, getting their news from television programs. 

According to Pew Research data compiled in April 2023, nearly half of Americans listen to podcasts, with most of them doing so for news purposes. The Pew survey found that 88 percent of those podcast listeners were doing so “to learn” about a subject and 64 percent said they were doing so to “stay up to date about current events.”

Pew broke down podcast listenership by age, and found that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 had listened to at least one podcast in the last year, compared to just 28 percent of Americans older than 65 who said the same. Of that 18–29 year old demographic, half of them say that they listen to a few podcasts every week.