If this wasn’t the Podcast Election, it was certainly a podcast-y election. Millions of people watched the results come in on a handful of livestreams hosted by popular podcasters, including one hosted by Tucker Carlson from Mar-a-Lago, on which Donald Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appeared as guests.

Trump also enjoyed a late-breaking endorsement from Joe Rogan, host of the world’s most popular podcast. For the past several months, much was made about the Trump campaign’s podcast strategy, reportedly masterminded by Trump’s son Barron, which included interviews with the tech-world whisperers Lex Fridman and the All-In Podcast. Trump took advantage of every opportunity to be interviewed at length and in casual conversation for huge audiences of young men; Harris did not, and immediately after her loss, this stood out to many people as a big problem. As New York Times editor Willy Staley put it in a wry (or grim) post on X, there is now palpable “soul-searching among Democrats about the podcast situation.”

I spent Election Night watching a livestream hosted by The Free Press, the media company founded by the former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. The guest list was a strange assemblage of iconoclasts and establishment castoffs, and it was obvious from the comments that many viewers were just there to watch It Girls Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, hosts of the cultish podcast Red Scare, smirk and sip teensy glasses of champagne while barely saying anything. (One of Nekrasova’s longer sentences of the night was “He’s winning like crazy, right?”)

[Read: Bad news]

A little after 8 p.m., the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang called in from a parking lot in Philadelphia. “I gotta say, the vibe’s kind of Trumpy,” he told Weiss. He had voted for Kamala Harris, he told her, though he hadn’t been excited about it. He offered his critique of the campaign run by Harris and Tim Walz, which he felt was overly risk-averse and uncharismatic. Specifically, he called out the missed opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, as both Trump and J. D. Vance had done. (Harris purportedly could have appeared on the show if she followed the host’s terms; in late October, Rogan wrote on X that, contrary to the campaign’s desires, he would not accept a one-hour time limit on the interview and that he wanted to record in his studio in Austin.) “It pisses me off,” Yang said.

“That was a gimme,” he went on. “The Rogan interview would have been almost entirely upside. It’s low-propensity male voters, people that are not inclined to vote for you, so you have nothing to lose.” On Carlson’s Election Night livestream, Elon Musk made a similar argument, alluding to the parasocial, possibly persuasive power of podcasts: “To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”

As I watched, I felt annoyed. Rogan’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and anti-trans shtick—among many other bizarre statements, such as his claim that intelligence agencies provoked January 6—should make him radioactive for any politician, let alone a Democrat in 2024. And anyway, “more podcasts” sounds like a pretty desperate response to such a monumental loss. But these are stupid times.

According to exit polls, Harris did do poorly with young men. Yang was clearly correct that she had nothing to lose. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote on Thursday, Harris may have avoided Rogan’s three-plus-hour, formless interview format for fear of messing up, “but given who ended up winning the election, this … seems like an antiquated concern.” Was this the difference? Definitely not. But it was a difference. Next time, I would guess, Rogan and his ilk will not be snubbed; the oddball internet is mainstream enough to seriously court.

Obviously, political campaigns always prioritize making their candidates appear accessible, relatable, authentic, and so on. For a useful historical parallel, I looked to 1976—another election in which a key issue was inflation, a key concern was turning out disaffected young voters and restoring faith in American institutions, and a key problem with the Democratic presidential campaign was that many people said they had no idea what it was about.

Jimmy Carter, after seeing what an interview in Playboy had done for California Governor Jerry Brown’s polling numbers during the primaries, agreed to sit for his own. The interviewer, Robert Scheer, wrote in the introduction: “For me, the purpose of the questioning was not to get people to vote for or against the man but to push Carter on some of the vagueness he’s wrapped himself in.” But in September 1976, when the magazine published the 12,000-word Q&A, it was regarded almost immediately as a disaster. Carter infuriated Christians and gave satirists plenty to lampoon with his description of feeling “lust” and “adultery” in his heart at times. (Many also read parts of the interview as obliquely referring to his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, as a liar.)

Scheer later said that the idea was to use the length and intimacy of the interview to answer the questions of young voters who “wondered if he was this Southern square.” He also thought that the interview had done exactly what the campaign wanted it to, even if it had made them nervous in the process.

Voter turnout in 1976 was abysmal, as expected in the aftermath of Watergate. But, although the interview was regarded by the national media as a major gaffe, apparently many voters didn’t think about it that way. Some were asked about it in polling conducted the same week it was published—of 1,168 respondents, 289 said they hadn’t heard about the interview, while 790 said they had but it hadn’t changed their minds. Carter did lose some small number of voters, at least in the moment—28 respondents said that the interview had caused them to change their vote from Carter to Gerald Ford, while only four said it had caused them to change their vote from Ford to Carter.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

In the end, Carter won with a narrow margin in the popular vote and outperformed Ford with voters ages 22 to 44, while falling short with voters 45 or older as well as with those 18 to 21. Voters recorded their feelings about the Playboy interview again in exit polls. They were asked whether there was anything they disliked about Carter and given eight choices of response, “I didn’t like his Playboy interview" among them. Again, the respondents said that they cared little about it. (They cared more that he was too pro-union.)

If you read all the critiques of the Harris campaign being written right now, you could come to the conclusion that she was both too online and not online enough. She misunderstood her youth support by looking too much at the wrong parts of TikTok; she went on Call Her Daddy, a massively popular podcast that began as part of the Barstool Sports extended universe but was, I guess, the wrong part. She won the endorsement of the two most popular musicians in the world, whose fans wield a ton of online “power,” however you define it. The default political and cultural stance on the Girl Internet is liberal to leftist and was pro-Harris, so maybe she spent too much time there and not enough in unfriendly corners.

There’s a more compelling case this time around that online misogyny had something to do with the results than there was after Trump’s first victory, in 2016, when reporters were so quick to explain how young men were radicalized in spaces like 4chan—a website that was always fairly niche, even if it did influence broader internet culture in certain ways. Today, discontented men are among the most popular influencers on major platforms.

The next Democratic candidate will surely sit for Rogan wherever he asks them to sit. They won’t have a choice. They’ll have to take the risk and act like they have nothing to lose—right now, that’s certainly the truth.

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How do you transform something so big, so existential, into something people can grasp? Last night, Oprah Winfrey gave it a shot as the penultimate speaker at Kamala Harris’s grand-finale rally in Philadelphia: “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

Every presidential election is the biggest ever, but this one lacks an adequate superlative. Throughout 2024, both parties have leaned on the imagery and messaging of our Founding Fathers. The Donald Trump acolyte and former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy frequently says that we’re living in a “1776 moment.” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s democratic governor, last night invoked Benjamin Franklin’s warning about our still-young country: “a republic, if you can keep it.” It’s an oft-repeated line, but that “if” lingered in a way I’d never felt before.

Shapiro was peering out at the tens of thousands of people standing shoulder to shoulder along Benjamin Franklin Parkway at the chilly election-eve gathering. Many attendees had been there for hours, and more than a few had grown visibly restless. Each emotion, both on the stage and in the crowd, was turned up to 11—fear, hope, promise, peril. At the lectern, Shapiro’s inflection mirrored that of former President Barack Obama. So much of Harris’s campaign send-off had the feel of Obama’s 2008 celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Will.i.am came ready with a song (a sequel to his Obama ’08 anthem, “Yes We Can”) titled—what else?—“Yes She Can.”

Around 11:30 p.m., Harris finally appeared at the base of the Rocky Steps to make her final pitch. Beyond the symbolic proximity to the Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall, this particular setting was a visual metaphor for, as Harris put it, those who “start as the underdog and climb to victory.” (Sadly, no one in the A/V booth thought to blast the Rocky horns as she walked up.) The truth is, it’s a bit of a stretch to call Harris the underdog. She is, after all, the quasi-incumbent, and polls suggest that the race is tied. Still, you sort of knew what she was getting at with the Rocky thing.

For the past nine years, the whole political world, and much of American life, has revolved around Donald Trump. He is an inescapable force, a fiery orange sun that promises to keep you safe, happy, and warm but, in the end, will burn you. Harris is running on preserving freedom and democracy, but she’s really just running against Trump. In surveys and interviews, many Americans say that they, too, are voting against Trump rather than for Harris. The election is about the future of America, but in a real sense, it’s about fear of one person.

Harris had already been in Scranton, Allentown, and Pittsburgh yesterday. But now her campaign had reached its finish line, in Philadelphia, and though I heard cautious optimism, none of the Harris campaign staffers I spoke with last night dared offer any sort of prediction. The closest I got was that some believe they’ll have enough internal data to know which states are actually in their column by late tonight, and that they expect the race might be called tomorrow morning or afternoon.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, wrapped up in an expectedly apocalyptic and campy manner. The truth is, some of his chaos worked—he never lost our attention. Consider the weeklong national conversation about the word garbage. A comedian’s stupid joke deeming Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” might end up being a determining factor in a Trump defeat, but President Joe Biden’s comment likening Trump supporters to garbage also proved a pivotal moment for the MAGA movement. In response to Biden, Trump appeared in a bright-orange safety vest as a way of owning the insult—a billionaire showing solidarity with the working class. In a similar late-campaign moment, Trump donned an apron and served fries at a (closed) McDonald’s. It wasn’t the work wear so much as the contrast that told the story: In both instances, Trump kept his shirt and tie on. These theatrical juxtapositions, however inane, have a way of sticking in your brain.

But not everyone gets the reality-TV component of his act. Many of his supporters take his every utterance as gospel. At Trump’s final rallies, some showed up in their own safety vests or plastic trash bags. Trump’s movement had quite literally entered its garbage phase. In his closing argument last night, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, called Harris “trash.” And Trump, days after miming oral sex onstage, kept the grossness going, mouthing that House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is a “bitch.”

Trump’s campaign was much longer than Harris’s, and for that reason, I spoke with far more Republicans than Democrats at campaign events this year. Across different cities and states, it was clear that people stood for hours at Trump rallies because they still obsess over Trump the man, and because Trumpism has become something like a religion. Trump makes a significant portion of the country feel good, either by stoking their resentments or simply making them believe he hears their concerns. In the end, though, he’s also the one feeding their fears.

It can be easy to write off American politics as a stadium-size spectacle that’s grown only cringier and uglier over the past decade. But last night, in my conversations with Philadelphians who’d braved the chill to see Harris, it became clear that the show was just the show, and that they had other priorities. Sure, they’d get to see Ricky Martin perform “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and hear Lady Gaga sing “God Bless America,” but all of that was extra. A trio of 20-year-old Temple University students—two of whom wore Brat-green Kamala beanies, one of whom wore a camo Harris Walz trucker hat—told me about their hometowns. One had come from nearby Bucks County, which he’d watched grow Trumpy over his teen years. Another was from the Jersey Shore and said she believed that people would egg her house if she put a Harris sign in the front yard. Another, who was from Texas, summed up the risks posed by Trump more succinctly than almost anyone I’ve spoken with over the past two years of covering the campaign: “He’ll let people get away with promoting hate and violence in our country, and I think that is my biggest fear.”

This election has been an elaborate traveling circus, with performers playing into all manner of dreams and nightmares. Trump has long relied on the allure of the show, and the preponderance of celebrity cameos at Harris’s recent rallies proves that she, too, understands the importance of star power. But now that all of the swing states have been barnstormed, and the billions of dollars have been spent, what’s left? The pageantry has entered its final hours. Tomorrow (or the next day … or the next day), a new iteration of American life begins. We won’t be watching it; we’ll be living it.

Related:

Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy. Podcast: Does America want chaos?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

This election is a test. Three tips for following election results without losing your mind X is a white-supremacist site, Charlie Warzel writes. The micro-campaign to target privately liberal wives

Today’s News

A federal judge ruled against state and national Republicans who tried to invalidate roughly 2,000 absentee ballots returned by hand over the weekend and yesterday in some of Georgia’s Democratic-leaning counties. The FBI said that many of the bomb threats made to polling locations in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Officials in Georgia and Michigan reported that their states received bomb threats linked to Russia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over their differences on how the war in Gaza should be conducted. Gallant, who was seen as a more moderate voice in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, will be replaced by Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz.

Evening Read

Justin Sullivan / Getty

The Right’s New Kingmaker

By Ali Breland

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove Me Wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates …

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the core of the conservative movement.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Anthony Gerace. Sources: Hulton Archive; Joe Vella / Alamy.

Read. The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, “probably saved my life,” George Packer writes. And the book’s vision remains startlingly relevant today.

Commemorate. The late producer Quincy Jones came from hardship and knew his history, which allowed him to see—and invent—the future of music, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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