A representative for Harris referred V.F. to her comments on the Rogan dust-up in her recent book 107 Days. “Even though most of my team thought doing the interview at all was a gamble, and others bluntly argued it was a bad idea, I really wanted to do it,” Harris wrote, adding that it “came as a surprise” when her campaign found out that Rogan was interviewing Trump on a day that his team had described to hers as a personal day. Addressing the claim on his podcast, Rogan has said, “we just didn’t tell you that Trump was coming on” and that Harris “never agreed to do the show.” Representatives for the podcaster didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
Flaherty, like so many Democrats in the aftermath of the election, has been reflecting on the nature of the modern attention economy, and what they could do to better harness it in the future. “Successful content on the internet is a reflection of an audience that already exists,” he says, “Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan because he speaks to a collection of people who are interested in what he has to say or the people that he brings on and his general tone and tenor and affect. If it weren’t Joe Rogan, it would be somebody else.” Democrats have been looking, as the now-cliched fantasy goes, for the Rogan of the left. As Flaherty sees it, though, the challenge for liberals is less to mimic the celebrated Trump podcasting tour than to build its own “loud and profitable and effective” niches on the internet in the way that Republicans did with the worlds of young men, fitness, and wellness.
Still, the standard, he says, for any campaign remains that “you just got to go talk to a lot of people and do a lot of stuff.” Since Harris’s loss, Democrats like Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Ro Khanna have been undertaking their own Trumpian tours of the extended Roganverse—Manhattan congressional candidate Jack Schlossberg recently told V.F. that his party’s recent woes have to do with its traditional views of polite behavior, while the other side uses “vulgarity…and insanity as a political weapon.”
Jesse Lehrich, a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign who hosts a TBPN-style livestreaming show with Flaherty, has been monitoring such appearances in a public spreadsheet titled the “Big, Beautiful 2028 Tracker.” “Sometimes it feels like, Oh, the takeaway is just, Oh, podcast is the new medium,” Lehrich told V.F. “And it’s like, No, I think people hate us because we don’t have relatable candidates.”
“People’s expectations of rawness and authenticity have scaled,” Flaherty says, “and so what you need to be able to do and say as an elected official has changed.”
Flaherty is not holding out for Rogan’s response to his account of the Harris episode, but he says he wouldn’t mind an opportunity to discuss further.
“Just lift my thing even farther, Joe,” he says. “Come on my podcast, Joe Rogan.”