Talarico and Clancy trial replace Trump on conservative podcasts
The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of conservative podcasts and found that mentions of President Trump’s name have fallen nearly 70% per hour from their peak during the 2024 election run-up. The Journal’s analysis, which tracked 147 shows that helped propel Trump to victory in 2024, drew on an in-house AI tool developed to monitor trends ahead of the November midterms. Data was current through Sept. 20.
The Journal also pulled in more than 10 million TikToks and Instagram posts from a range of creators and crossed those with thousands of hours of broadcast news and the Journal’s own reporting to understand the topics circulating in mainstream discourse.
Trump has urged voters to keep him front of mind when they head to the polls in November, telling supporters at the GOP midterm convention to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” Congressional Republican leaders have put the president at the center of their effort to keep control of the House and Senate, despite his low approval ratings, though some Republicans in tight races have begun to distance themselves from him.
But the podcasts that amplified his messages in 2024 are not playing along. Advisers have told Trump that the Iran war is sapping his supporters’ enthusiasm, the Journal reported. Gas prices are nearly $4.50 a gallon nationally, and the share of Republicans who say the economy is better than a year ago has collapsed from over 70% in January to 29% in September, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.
Monthly mentions of Trump’s name on conservative podcasts have fallen 30% since the U.S. launched the war in late February, the Journal found. Some hosts aired disapproval, and a few — including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — broke publicly with the administration. Left-leaning podcasts, by contrast, held steady in their mentions of Trump, as Democrats seek to make the midterms a referendum on him.
As Trump’s mentions continued their slide through the summer, conservative hosts turned increasingly to Texas state legislator James Talarico, who has become the most-discussed Democrat in the country who is not a former president on the 147 shows tracked. This month, hosts named him more often than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — and nearly three times as often as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“If you look at this race, James Talarico, I think, is a dangerous candidate,” one host said, according to the Journal. “I think substantively he is radical and extreme, but he’s very good at seeming charming. He’s very good at seeming innocuous. Personally, I prefer my wolves in wolves’ clothing, not in sheep’s clothing.”
Democrats have not won a statewide office in Texas since 1994. Polls show Talarico, who has campaigned on his Christian faith, in a tight race against Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump-aligned figure backed by national Republicans pouring money into the state. Trump has called him “Talafreako” and railed against him at the GOP midterm convention.
MAGA podcasters portray Talarico as a radical leftist out of touch with Texans, frequently attacking him for past comments he has made about religion, transgender rights and immigration — including one remark in which he said “God is nonbinary.” Talarico has said he “missed the mark” on some of his past statements.
The other topic filling conservative podcast airtime was not political on its face: the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman accused of murdering her three children. Clancy said she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. The case ended in a mistrial earlier this month after jurors repeatedly failed to reach a verdict.
“You cannot spend 100 years telling society our biology does not make us incapable of responsibility and then, when something horrific happens, suddenly say, well, you have to understand our biology,” one host said, the Journal reported.
By the time it ended, the trial had become part of a broader debate over mental illness, motherhood and traditional gender roles. Hundreds of women rallied outside the courthouse. The jury that deadlocked was nine women and three men, with 11 jurors favoring a finding that Clancy was not criminally responsible. The lone holdout was a man.
Some conservative podcasters saw a double standard, with hosts and guests arguing that Clancy’s gender was the point and that no man would be excused the way she was. A YouGov poll earlier this month found that 61% of Republicans thought Clancy should have been found guilty of murder, compared with 34% of Democrats and 43% of independents. Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to say Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity.
The Journal’s analysis found that the Clancy trial was among the mainstream news stories that traveled furthest last month into parts of social media that are not normally political. Of those, only complaints about the cost of living reached more corners of TikTok, and none drew more creators who otherwise post about sports, parenting or anime. Takes on TikTok ranged from condemning Clancy to offering empathy on postpartum mental health — and included conspiracy theories that her former husband was responsible.
Trump himself acknowledged he was following the trial. After the mistrial, he said, “It’s on television so much, it’s hard not to follow it.”