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In the final stretch of the US election, vice-president Kamala Harris has gone on a long-awaited media blitz, appearing daily this week to make her pitch to Americans.
There was CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s The View, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern’s radio programme, all of which aired in the span of a couple of days. But one interview caught some by surprise: Harris’s decision to appear on Call Her Daddy, one of the most popular podcasts in the US, with 5mn downloads a week.
Started six years ago as a chat show in which two twenty-something women shared stories about sex and dating, Call Her Daddy has evolved into a “go-to” platform for big celebrity interviews. Host Alex Cooper recently signed a deal to shift the podcast from Spotify to SiriusXM for a reported $125mn across three years.
The Harris interview did draw some flak. “What a joke: Kamala Harris avoids substantive interviews in favour of a podcast known for sex revelations,” wrote one opinion columnist in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post tabloid.
But there was a clear rationale behind the vice-president’s choice to appear. Call Her Daddy was the second most popular podcast on Spotify last year, trailing only Joe Rogan’s. Its audience is primarily young women. Crucially, these are young women from across the political spectrum, and the country. About 48 per cent of Call Her Daddy’s audience are Democrats, while 24 per cent are Republicans and 20 per cent are Independents, according to Edison Research. About a third of these listeners live in the South, with 20 per cent in the Midwest.
Cooper seemed to acknowledge that some of her audience — the “Daddy Gang” — would not be happy with her having Harris on the podcast. “I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everybody feels comfortable tuning in,” she said at the start of the episode. Ultimately, “I couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women, and I’m not a part of it.”
The interview seemed to go fine, for both sides. Cooper was more serious than usual. She tends to empathise with her guests, cozying up to them on plush sofas in sweatpants — a tactic that is effective in getting interviewees to open up. But with Harris, Cooper seemed more restrained, focusing her questions on women and abortion, the topics she feels most qualified to discuss.
It would have been difficult to imagine this scenario just a few years ago. Until the reversal of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court ruling on abortion in 2022, Cooper had largely avoided politics. After growing up in a Pennsylvania suburb, she created the podcast in 2018 with her roommate Sofia Franklyn when the two were recent university graduates living in New York. Coming across as typical sorority girls, they quickly gained a following, swapping graphic stories about their travails as single women. They named it Call Her Daddy to subvert traditional power structures in relationships (Cooper opens every episode with: “It’s your founding father, Alex Cooper”). Franklyn left the podcast in 2020.
In the past few years, Cooper has pivoted. She has focused more on women’s issues and mental health. In some respects, her evolution mirrors the wider shift among young US women. Young women and men in the US are diverging along political lines, with women and girls becoming increasingly left-leaning, particularly since the Roe v Wade decision. A few months after the Supreme Court ruling, Cooper travelled to an abortion clinic for an episode.
Rolling Stone magazine has called Cooper “Gen-Z’s Barbara Walters”. But the reach of today’s podcast stars is still narrower than during the days of traditional television. Rogan is very popular. But even among people who listen to podcasts regularly, only 5 per cent say his is their top podcast. My parents don’t know who Rogan is. Today’s version of popularity is still niche.
The Harris media blitz speaks to how fragmented the landscape is. Donald Trump, her opponent in the race for the presidency, has been appearing everywhere for many months: on cable news, podcasts, live-streamers, across all the media diets of his base. Harris has been more selective but the breadth is similar: she has appeared on Call Her Daddy for young women, 60 Minutes to reach mainstream older Americans and Stern’s show for men.
“Each show reaches a specific, unique audience that Democrats need (& arguably haven’t really engaged with in the past),” Victor Shi, who works for the Harris “youth team”, wrote on X. “Put simply, VP Harris is going everywhere”.
anna.nicolaou@ft.com
