Joe Rogan Isn’t a Right-Winger -- He’s a Swing Voter

Misunderstanding Rogan, and voters like him, may have helped sink the Kamala Harris campaign.

"Joe Rogan" by Steven Crowder is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

In the past month, a popular podcast host described the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris like this:

She had an amazing speech — when I was like, she could win — was when she had that one speech about Donald Trump, like, scared to debate her: “But he says all these things. But you know what? What I always heard, if you want to say something, say it to my face.” And the whole place went crazy. And she was laughing. …. It was so good. It was her best speech for sure. …. Biden stepped down and she had one banger of a speech. She looked young and energetic.

Also in the past month, the host described their view about abortion as so:

I’m not a woman. I should not have the choice of what a woman can and can’t do with her body. I would not want a man, if I was a woman, to tell me what the fuck I can do with my body. And I think it’s all connected to religion.

In the same episode, this is what they had to say about the ongoing Israel-Gaza war:

The objective reality is blown apart children. And not just one. Tens of thousands of innocent people dead.

And this is what the host had to say about access to psychedelic drugs late last month:

There are so many anecdotal stories about veterans experiencing relief that I think it should be available to them, especially veterans.

Does any of this sound particularly conservative to you?

Would you be surprised that the podcast host in question is Joe Rogan, who helms the most popular ongoing series in America?

If you’re a regular listener of his, you’re probably not shocked. We all know the score.

But to Democrats whose knowledge of Rogan mostly comes from the words of his critics, I imagine they’d be genuinely surprised to know that the popular podcast host agrees with them on all kinds of issues, from abortion to drug legalization.

Yes, Rogan endorsed Donald Trump during this year’s presidential election. But his vote for Trump was probably the first time in his life that he had voted for a Republican to take over the White House. (If I find out otherwise, I’ll update this post.)

Left-wing commentators, many of whom view Rogan as indistinguishable from a Republican spokesman, spent the election annoyed by him.

Elie Mystal, The Nation’s Justice correspondent and a frequent cable news contributor, sparked a bit of left-leaning brainstorming online when he stated that what Harris — who ultimately decided not to appear on Rogan’s program — really needed was an echo chamber of her own.

“People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point,” he tweeted the day after Harris lost the election. “That wouldn’t have helped her. Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN. Somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to, without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires like Elon Musk.”

But there already was a liberal Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan.

For years, Rogan was totally in sync with liberals. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, his kindest words towards any candidate were said about Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist.

"I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie,” he said in the run up to the vote.

He explained how he admired Sanders’s principles.

“He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing — been for the same thing — his entire life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from,” he said.

But Rogan had a less-than-pleasant experience with left-leaning activists in the years since he praised Sanders.

In 2022, he faced an intense campaign by pressure groups who wanted him removed from the Spotify streaming platform because of his skepticism towards the public health establishment. When that initial wave of attacks didn’t work, they turned to other topics to try to deplatform him.

Someone even made a supercut of sorts of him vocalizing racial slurs over the years, providing no context whatsoever. I dug into some of his early remarks and found that one reason he would sometimes say these slurs was to condemn racism.

But the die was cast. Rogan was increasingly portrayed by the left as a right-wing, manosphere-inhabiting, racist neanderthal who was dedicated to leading America’s revanchist conservative movement.

And yet if you listen to his program regularly, which I do, you’ll find someone who is less interested in being a more manly Ben Shapiro than he is in talking about sports, celebrities, culture, drugs, or anything else that happens to interest him in the moment.

Rogan’s appeal has always been that he’s a fairly ordinary guy shooting the breeze with whoever is willing to talk to him. Politics rarely comes up on his program, which is not what you’d expect if you believed the caricatures.

I’d posit that Rogan fundamentally isn’t a leftist or a conservative. He’s someone who occasionally pays attention to politics, has a just a few firm beliefs (like what he thinks about abortion or drugs), and is genuinely curious and open-minded.

In other words, he’s the most high-profile swing voter in America.

Which is why it was extra disappointing to see Doug Emhoff aide Jennifer Palmieri (who was my boss’s boss back when I worked at the Center for American Progress) confess to the Financial Times that part of the reason Harris didn’t end up doing Rogan’s show was because they were scared of backlash from their progressive staffers.

“There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” she said at a recent event.

Palmieri quickly took to Twitter after her words were reported and claimed that the campaign was ready to appear with Rogan, but they couldn’t work it out.

Given that I worked with her, I don’t want to question Palmieri’s motives, but my guess is that a combination of factors led to Harris never appearing on Rogan’s show: it may have been logistically difficult, Harris might not have been confident she could speak extemporaneously for three hours, and progressive staffers may have been skeptical of the whole move altogether.

Whatever you think about the Harris-Rogan affair, I think what Democrats need to understand going forward is that Rogan is no hardened right-winger and it wasn’t inevitable that he would’ve endorsed Trump.

Instead, think about it this way.

Trump and his running mate the Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance both traveled to Austin and appeared on his show. They fielded his questions — including adversarial questions about abortion, where Rogan has strong convictions — and gave him a generous amount of their time.

If you listen to Rogan regularly, you’ll note that amongst guests who are political, most of them have been right-leaning lately. That’s probably because most progressives aren’t even trying to engage with Rogan anymore. But is that really the right move?

Rogan is not hostile to Democratic guests. The Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman appeared on his show after Harris chose not to. Rogan wanted Harris to come and sit with him, too. And as the transcript above demonstrates, there were moments where he found her likable and charismatic. It’s possible she could have won him over — or at least won over some of his listeners.

But if one side is willing to show up and talk to you and the other side is either actively ignoring you or actively smearing you, what else do you think will happen?

Remember that both campaigns were bombarding undecided voters with campaign ads for a reason.

It’s just that Harris campaign made the decision to overlook America’s most important one.