Who's Winning the Podcast Midterms?

We picked ten races by hand, six Senate contests that look competitive and four governor races in big states. For each race we show the candidate on each side with the largest share of voice.

Democrats lead all six Senate races on share of voice, and Republicans lead three of the four governor races. The biggest gaps in appearances are in California, where Steve Hilton has 104 to Xavier Becerra’s 21, and Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed has 94 to Mike Rogers’s 26.

Steve Hilton, the Republican running for governor of California, tops the list with 104 appearances. Ro Khanna is second with 101 and Abdul El-Sayed third with 94. Six of the ten are Democrats.

Khanna has the largest share of voice of the ten, 4.9 million, ahead of Hilton’s 4.2 million. Tim Burchett’s share of voice was boosted a lot by one episode with Joe Rogan.

We track more than 4 million podcasts at Rephonic and use AI to pull the guests out of episode transcripts. For this page we took the 1,411 general-election candidates for US Senate, governor and House and matched their names against the guests on episodes published between 1 January and 10 October 2026.

Two AI models then checked every match against the episode’s show notes and transcript, and we took out the ones where a candidate was talked about but wasn’t a guest. That left 6,845 appearances across 1,960 podcasts. An appearance is one candidate on one show, so repeat visits count once.

By listeners we mean a show’s estimated downloads per episode, which is close to the number of people listening but not the same thing. Share of voice is the listeners of each show a candidate appeared on, added up for each party. Third-party and independent candidates are left out of the comparisons. Monthly figures count each show once per candidate per month.

Our guide to podcasts for political campaigns explains how to build a list of shows in your district and what to look at before accepting a booking.