Less than three weeks before Election Day, the 2024 campaign is in its final swing. And while some listeners may have had their fill of attack ads, there is no shortage of interest in the race. Triton Digital collaborated with Signal Hill Insights to examine the impact on political podcast downloads, and they find a booming audience. The data shows that political podcasts have seen a 28% increase in year-over-year downloads, with incremental increases during the last six months.
Despite a flood of conservative-leaning podcasts launching since the last presidential election cycle, the analysis finds that podcast listening continues to be dominated by progressive shows. Triton and Signal Hill say there have been twice as many downloads that come from Democrat-leaning podcasts than Republican-leaning ones. Yet the crop of conservative shows are closing the gap. Although Democrat-leaning podcasts still make up the majority of the political podcast market, they saw their listenership decline from 58% to 56% year-over-year while Republican podcasts rose from 23% to 28% of total political podcast downloads.
The analysis finds that podcasts are ready-made for campaigns, as they typically deliver the kind of listener that is more likely to show up to vote on Election Day. Triton and Signal Hill say the demographic profile of political podcast listeners reveals an older, highly educated, and affluent audience compared to the U.S. general 18+ population. It finds 59.7% are college graduates, 31.9% report a household income exceeding $100,000, and nearly half (47.2%) are 55 years or older.
The data shows some differences based on political persuasion, however. While still affluent and educated compared to the overall U.S. population, Republican-leaning podcast listener profiles under-index compared to Democrat and Independent-leaning podcasts on income, education and age attributes. The conservative shows also have the highest proportion (89.9%) of White listeners among the three political leanings.
In contrast, Democrat-leaning podcasts have the highest proportion (17.4%) of Black listeners. And independent-leaning political podcasts have the highest proportion (16.2%) of Hispanic listeners. The data also shows indie podcast listeners are 68.2% college-educated, and 62.4% male.
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