Forget Joe Rogan. The Next Big Podcast Bro Is in the Senate.

Ted Cruz may see a new path to the White House in today’s changing political-media ecosystem.

By Ben Jacobs

11/19/2025 05:00 AM EST

Three times a week, late in the evening, a middle-aged man pulls a microphone out of a Pelican briefcase, unscrews a bottle of Bai flavored antioxidant water and opens a window into the future of American politics.

He’s a podcaster, of course, but an unlikely one. It’s Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican best known as a leader of his party’s pre-Donald Trump hard-right and the runner-up behind Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination.

And perhaps even more shocking is that his show, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” is the most popular podcast by far of any sitting politician in the United States. He’s not exactly Joe Rogan or a Kelce brother. But with up to two million downloads a month and syndicated across iHeart radio, the podcast puts him on solid ground in his side hustle and well ahead of potential 2028 competitors; in July, he had almost three and half times as many downloads as Gavin Newsom, who has the second most popular podcast among elected officials.

At a moment when influencers increasingly have parasocial relationships with their fanbases and when the traditional media landscape is only growing more fractured, the podcast gives Cruz a much bigger platform than the average politician — and a potential head start for a future presidential run.

Cruz started the Verdict podcast as a passion project in 2019 during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. It was a rare moment where constitutional law took center stage in the American political debate and there were not a lot of opportunities for Cruz to go deep into the weeds. Fox News is willing to air all sorts of unconventional things but it’s not big on mentions of the 18th century impeachment trial of Warren Hastings by the British House of Lords.)

Every night, after the Senate had gaveled out for the day, Cruz would go to a nearby studio to debrief listeners on the events of the day and weigh in not just on the allegations against Trump but the finer points of law and the occasional Senate floor gossip. The podcast was an immediate hit.

“We started with zero listeners, and within a week, it skyrocketed to being the number one ranked podcast in the world,” Cruz marveled in a recent interview. Since then, the frequency of the episodes has changed as well as the podcast’s co-host, but the Texas senator’s commitment to the medium has remained.

As a side hustle goes, it is a grind. Cruz and his co-host, conservative pundit Ben Ferguson, will sort through a list of a half dozen topics selected by Cruz’s staff, pick their favorites, work out a rough running order and start recording.

The resulting conversation comes out the next morning to a dedicated fan base that hears Cruz in a relatively unvarnished setting, one far less focused on talking points than a cable news hit. It’s not that the Texas senator is totally unleashed — after all, he’s still Ted Cruz — but he gives a fuller sense of who he is, including with bad impersonations and long detailed digressions and explanations of his thoughts.

Asked whether the podcast could help in another White House bid, a Cruz spokesperson shrugged off the question: “Verdict with Ted Cruz was launched to give listeners a behind-the-scenes look at what’s really happening in Washington, D.C. The podcast focuses on the most important issues affecting Americans that the mainstream media won’t cover or will cover with bias. That is why the podcast was launched and is its number one purpose.”

However, 2028 is not that far away. And with Trump constitutionally ineligible to run again, the Texas Republican is already starting off with a massive email list, near universal name ID among the party faithful and a first place finish in Iowa to his name. In a political-media ecosystem facing deep disruption and campaigns going out of their way to court influencers, his podcast gives him another boost. After all, candidate Cruz doesn’t need to do much to win the endorsement of podcaster Cruz.

The presidential primary campaigns of yesteryear were built around appealing to local quirks and featured unlikely underdogs pulling out the unlikeliest of successes. In 2008, John McCain travelled across New Hampshire taking questions from all comers en route to reviving his once seemingly doomed campaign. In 2012, Rick Santorum went from Pizza Ranch to Pizza Ranch in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, rising from asterisk in the polls to eventual winner of the Iowa Caucuses. The presidential campaign trail was a place where retail politics mattered, and the local rituals and routines were critical.

Even in 2016, Cruz got far in his pursuit of the Republican nomination with a campaign that adhered to tradition — visiting all 99 Iowa counties and repeatedly pressing the flesh with the evangelical voters who dominate the Iowa caucuses. He fell short, of course, in the face of Trump’s sui generis campaign with a celebrity force that allowed him to ignore all conventional wisdom.

Since then, it’s not just that Trump has changed politics; there have also been drastic shifts in media and technology. We now live in a world where people are increasingly tied to each other virtually instead of through face-to-face interaction, and where voters are more likely to get their news from an influencer than a broadcaster. The effects will not only make 2028 different from the past but make the early states similar to everywhere else.

The decline of local media has been well documented, and the key early primary states have not been immune. In New Hampshire, the once-influential Union-Leader’s daily circulation is now less than 16,000 and its decline has been more gradual than the Des Moines Register, which has seen its circulation collapse by nearly 50 percent down to 27,446 , just since 2018. At the same time, national cable news and mainstream media outlets have receded in importance alongside local news.

Mike Biundo, who was Santorum’s 2012 campaign manager and has since gone to work for presidential candidates like Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, recalled, “Fox News in particular controlled the narrative,” although he noted CNN still mattered “because it wasn’t as polarizing on the right as it as it is today.”

Not anymore. Santorum, a former CNN pundit who now works for Newsmax, told me, “The audience share has just been chopped up, and so you have to work all these different angles to get all these different tribes that are being created.” As voters turn to competing social media personalities, the quest for attention has become “a battle of the influencers,” per Santorum.

In this fragmented world, online personalities still play key roles in elevating politicians, even if none has the influence once wielded by Roger Ailes at Fox. In fact, the power of the MAGA internet is such at this point that as one plugged-in Republican operative who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about party figures told POLITICO Magazine in July before the conservative kingmaker’s assassination, “I’d rather have Charlie Kirk’s endorsement in Iowa than Chuck Grassley’s.”

Amid the rise of social media and national influencers, once highly prized local endorsements matter less, too. In 2024, Ron DeSantis saw virtually no impact from the endorsement he snagged from Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical leader in the state and longtime powerbroker among social conservatives.

The workaround, perhaps, is for politicians to become influencers themselves.

Cruz is not the first. The TikToks of former Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-N.C.) or Instagram Live appearances from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have drawn ardent followings. But just as politicians grasped the opportunities of earlier mediums to build followings — without television, Ronald Reagan would have never been president — Cruz has grasped the opportunity to build an online brand in tandem with building a legislative record, including as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. In other words, being both Charlie Kirk and Chuck Grassley at the same time.

Cruz has always been quick on his feet. He’s a former college debating champion and can easily steer even the most hostile questions back to his talking points. But listeners don’t tune into podcasts for message discipline.

“A good podcast feels like you’re sitting in a cafe having a cup of coffee and just talking across the table,” Cruz told me. Compared to a television hit or a stump speech, “it’s a different muscle.”

For Cruz, the key to the podcast’s sustained success is the wonky deep dives, which are broken down carefully for a more casual listener. “A smart high school kid or college student could listen to it and understand what is happening,” he said. The typical podcast lasts 30-40 minutes. “We chose about that length because that’s a typical commute, or someone running on a treadmill,” he said. “But the nice thing is, if you have a topic with a lot to say, you can keep going, you can talk as long as you need to on a topic, and when you’re done, you can shut up.”

He’s also detected a real demographic distinction when it comes to his fans. If a woman in her 70s comes up to him at an airport to offer a compliment, she’s going to say, “Hey, I loved you on Fox News last week.” And if a man in his 20s comes up to him, with a ponytail and tattoos, he gets, “I love the podcast.”

“Because those guys aren’t watching cable news,” Cruz said, “but they are listening to podcasts.” Indeed, Trump rode to victory in 2024 in part by surfing the podcast circuit and winning support from disaffected young men.

Of course, it’s not just young people who listen to podcasts. And increasingly, social media has replaced the full gamut of traditional news sources and campaign opportunities as voters engage in politics constantly via a smart phone.

Alex De Grasse, a longtime top aide to GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik and a MAGA personality on Steve Bannon’s War Room, told me campaigns needed to view themselves as professional content creating operations. They “create content, distributing it to people directly, and the traditional press can be used in that lens to essentially just amplify whatever content you’re trying to move,” he argued. DeGrasse pointed to New York’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as a model along with Trump for what he called “the TikTokification of campaigns.”

In this new world, retail campaigning still has value — but perhaps more for the opportunities for content creation. “Way more people are going to see your video of you at some county fair than will see you at the county fair,” said De Grasse. The goal for candidates should be to display their charisma not just for attendees but to everyone else as well.

It’s worth noting that these trends are far more pronounced among Republicans than Democrats so far. It’s not just that Cruz’s podcast is more successful than Gavin Newsom’s but that there is more appetite for it on the right. Democratic voters still have a more traditional media diet, and their primary voters have not been subject to the distorting effect of Trump.

There is no reason to think the current class of conservative influencers — figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson and Tucker Carlson — would lose their grip on the Republican faithful any time soon. But this media environment is not yet replicated on the other side of the aisle. As one longtime Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly noted, “Nobody’s going to base their vote off of who the Young Turks or Harry Sisson are supporting.”

Furthermore, traditional powerbrokers still have more sway among Democrats. After all, Joe Biden’s entire presidency could probably be attributed to Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of him in the days before the 2020 South Carolina primary, which transformed Biden from a flailing afterthought to nomination frontrunner almost overnight.

Still, Democrats aren’t immune from the broader trends in society driving these changes and the more nationalized politics it produces. Americans of all political persuasions seem to be spending far too much time online these days.

The cliche of presidential campaigns is that they are about meeting people where they are, and increasingly, they are no longer at diners or fish fries, but on their phones, watching videos and listening to podcasts. In the end, no matter how different a place may be — the cornfields of Iowa are far different from the mill towns of New Hampshire — everyone’s screen looks the same when they are scrolling.

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