The hosts of “Pod Save America” skipped their usual programming after then-President Joe Biden faceplanted in his debate with now-President Donald Trump. Instead of outlining an optimistic view of Democrats’ chances, the former Obama administration staffers taped an episode called “A Brutally Honest Debate Recap” about whether the 81-year-old incumbent was fit to run against Trump at all.
The break from party orthodoxy upset some Democratic bigwigs. That included Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, who sent a fundraising pitch to supporters after the episode aired, throwing out a veiled insult at “self-important Podcasters” who doubted Biden’s ability to win.
At some point over the course of more than a thousand podcast episodes, though, “self-important” turned into just “important,” no qualifiers.
Now, Democratic operatives widely agree that a candidate’s appearance on the show is unequivocally good for any campaign. A sit-down with the “Pod Save” crew is practically a required stop for any 2028 hopeful, whether to draw attention in a digital environment where people’s focus is getting harder to earn, or to attract organizers and donors who could fuel groundwork IRL.
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“Pod Save” ranks among both Spotify’s and Apple Podcasts’ most popular shows in the U.S., and consistently sits among the top 25 podcasts in terms of reach in Edison Research’s quarterly metrics rankings since Trump’s second election. How Democrats use it to hash out their ongoing, heated intraparty debates over wokeness, foreign policy, health care and other issues could play a major role in where the party ultimately lands.
Still, in 2024, the podcasters got their way, but their team fell short: Biden dropped out and Trump won. This prompted reflection from the party, as well as from the podcasters.
“I want to do some personal soul-searching, and the party to do soul-searching to fix this, and to do better next time,” Tommy Vietor, one of the hosts, said at the time.
Nearly two years later, Vietor doesn’t have much to say about the results of that search.
“I don’t remember saying that at all,” he told The Washington Sun. “What has that looked like? I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer to that.”
What was once a mainstream, often milquetoast liberal media platform that was criticized for being too beholden to the ever-amorphous party “establishment” now reflects the party’s existential woes.
Its relevance isn’t in question. But the hosts’ qualms with the party’s old guard have apparently resulted in a leftward drift in their content that’s made them divisive within the party.
“They are like men in a midlife crisis who were at the top of a medium that a lot of Dems did not understand,” said Yemisi Egbewole, a former Biden aide and now a fellow with the centrist organization Third Way. “I’ve watched lots of ‘Pod Save’ where they’re critiquing the current Democratic Party and the Democratic establishment, and I just think: ‘Didn’t you help construct this for eight consecutive years?’”
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#Resisting Trump’s first term was the express reason the podcasters, former Democratic communications officials, started the show in January 2017. Vietor, Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett founded progressive media company Crooked Media at the same time, with the hope of building a network that could one day counterbalance the right’s well-funded media apparatus. They take turns hosting the show alongside Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser for Barack Obama.
“We just wanted to create a place where we could have these debates. We are not looking to be the deciders. We’re not trying to be judge and jury,” Vietor said. “We’re all going to say what we think, and voice our own personal opinions, but we don’t want to be — in no way are we trying for the show to be a place that’s adjudicating, or deciding what’s right and wrong.”
Crooked and its offshoots quickly became an all-inclusive Democratic powerhouse. If the focus was once counterprogramming to Trump’s stronghold over the Republican Party, their strongest leverage today is within their own party.
“They have high-level experience in Democratic politics and strong relationships with decision-makers who represent most of the perspectives in the party,” Andrew Bates, a former Biden spokesperson, said in a text message. “It’s valuable that Democrats who are on different wavelengths can get a fair hearing from ‘Pod Save America’ while at the same time being questioned by campaign veterans who talk like normal people and have a strong sense of conscience.”
The hosts’ positions within the ongoing intraparty war are hard to pin down. And how seriously they seem to think the Democratic Party at large should take their opinions is even harder to articulate — especially ahead of the party’s sure-to-be fiery and likely crowded 2028 presidential primary.
“The day after the midterms, everyone is going to turn to focus on 2028. There will be fights about policy. There will be fights about the best way to communicate. There will be fights about electability. We’re going to go through all of it,” Vietor told The Washington Sun. “We just want to figure out how to provide a platform to all those candidates to make their pitch, to argue about their perspective versus another.”
Intentionally or not, the podcast’s hosts have found ways to wield their large platform’s influence on the party in recent years, like their post-debate episodes where they openly and forcefully questioned Biden’s viability. Or, more recently, in April, when Favreau grilled Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin over his committee’s butchered and then-unreleased 2024 election autopsy.
“I don’t know that the current DNC leadership is the biggest fan of our show,” Vietor told The Washington Sun. The DNC did not respond to a request for comment.
They’ve leaned into the base’s progressive, antiestablishment energy, while also broadcasting pragmatic go-vote, get-involved advice to a country deeply disillusioned with, and deeply distrustful of, just about every major political institution.
Occasionally, the hosts poke at tensions within Democrats’ “Big Tent,” using terminology only someone doused in insular online Democratic discourse would understand. In July, Favreau jokingly introduced notorious centrist poster Matt Yglesias as “the online left’s favorite pundit,” as a spokesperson for “the ‘neolib’ shill faction,” and acknowledged that the show’s audience, as of late, has mainly heard from progressive, antiestablishment candidates hoping to push the party left.
“We haven’t really had someone on, at least in a while, make a full-throated case for a center-left politics that emphasizes moderation,” said Favreau on the podcast, explaining the Yglesias appearance. “I know that probably sounds exciting and not at all annoying to many of you.”
It’s hard to find a positive comment on that video. Vietor said he and his co-hosts don’t pay much mind to viewer comments because people tend to take the time to do that out of anger. There seems to be no way for the podcast to make everyone in the party happy.
“We did an interview with Matt Yglesias. People were mad about that. Did an interview with Hasan Piker. People were mad about that,” Vietor said. “Same comments, different perspective. I think it’s fine. It’s a good thing.”
While the show’s hosts have caught a fair amount of flak for having had Piker — a Twitch streamer who’s stirred heated arguments within the party for his polarizing comments about Israel — on their show multiple times, Vietor acknowledged that Piker holds a valuable role in left-wing media.
“We need more people communicating with more groups of voters on every platform in authentic ways,” Vietor told The Washington Sun.
“Often, it’s young men who feel especially estranged from the system, the establishment, from politics, and you know, talk to them about progressive values and prevent them from going down to the other side of the horseshoe and getting red-pilled and ending up watching Nick Fuentes,” he explained of Piker’s audience and influence.
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Even if it’s not clear what the hosts think the party might, or should, look like by 2028, some listeners have noticed the hosts’ antiestablishment tack.
Longtime Democrats said they identified with the “Pod Save” hosts’ perceived political trajectory, or at least with their frustrations with the party’s status quo.
“They, like many sort of ‘normie Democrats,’ are really pissed at the party. They share a lot of rank-and-file party members’ and Democratic primary voters’ frustration with ‘the establishment’ — with the gatekeepers, with the old guard,” said Amanda Litman, cofounder of Run For Something, a progressive political organization that recruits and props up younger candidates for down-ballot races, who’s appeared multiple times on the show. “The version of us that has existed up until now has gotten us to this point. This point is bad.”
The show has maintained a particularly powerful platform, Litman said, not only because of the audience’s size, but because it’s chock-full of particularly eager and engaged Democrats. Sure, they might not represent a median voter, but their community — whose paid members are affectionately, parasocially referred to as “Friends of the Pod” — is activated by what they hear.
On the other hand, progressives say the hosts still seem to be grappling with their centrist, politics-as-usual tendencies.
Joe Wrote, the pen name for a Democratic socialist whose media criticism often gains online traction, said he’s noticed, while watching the show and reading viewer feedback, that “it seems like people are pretty solidly to the left of where they are, and they’re being pulled along.” To him, the show’s welcoming platform is also its pitfall.
“When you have these politicians on, and you don’t hold their feet to the fire or press them on how their beliefs are out of step with the Democratic electorate, then you’re not really addressing the tension,” Joe Wrote said. “I think the ‘Pod Save America’ guys and their hosts do think that they can build a better world. I just think that at some point, they do have to ask themselves, ‘Is our theory delivering?’ Right? We spent the last decade telling people to vote, vote, vote. It didn’t work.”
The hosts act more as wind vanes than bellwethers, other Democrats agreed.
“A bunch of people that were working within or working with the establishment when that was working for Democrats have seen the establishment fail,” said the digital strategist behind the X account OrganizerMemes, best known for holding workshops to help Democrats create memes for campaigns and progressive causes. “The movement is a different place than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, where a lot of people, I think, are more open to giving the more progressive wing a shot because of the failures.”
After this year’s midterms, which will follow a summer of bitter primaries for Democrats, the party will have only two years to gauge its base’s appetite for change and strategically market a wholesale vision of what a Democratic future can even look like post-Trump.
Trump “upended” American politics as the men had understood them, Vietor acknowledged — and he admits that “the base is getting fed up with the system,” and also that its voters “hate politics, they don’t think it’s working, and they want something different.”
Still, nearly a decade after their first episode, the hosts’ advice on how their listeners can save America remains unchanged.
“If you’re frustrated, you know, get in there and change it. That’s the only way it works. We — it’s a frustrating answer sometimes, but this is the country we’ve got. This is the political system we’ve got,” Vietor said. “And if you want to fix it, you know, roll up your sleeves. Like, that’s my answer.”
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