‘Pod Save America’ won’t quit

It was past midnight on June 28, and four podcast hosts were wide awake in a hotel suite in Boston.

Hours earlier, Democrats around the nation had gone to bed stunned after President Joe Biden fumbled through his debate against former President Donald Trump. Crowded around a table in a dimly lit room, the four men, hosts of the popular podcast “Pod Save America,” were trying to process what they had just seen — not only for themselves but also for their millions of listeners.

“It would be silly not to have this conversation,” one of the show’s hosts, Jon Favreau, said on the recording.

“A Brutally Honest Debate Recap,” the 892nd episode of the 7-year-old political podcast hosted by four former Obama administration officials, was a turning point in what Democrats were willing to say about Biden’s chances in the 2024 race.

For months, the hosts had acknowledged polling and reporting that showed Biden’s age was a sticking point for voters. Last year on the show, they hosted Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., who had wanted to challenge Biden for the party’s nomination largely because of concerns about his age.

But like most mainstream, high-profile Democrats, the men of “Pod Save America” had stopped well short of suggesting Biden should step aside.

Before the postdebate episode aired, anyone discussing the possibility of replacing Biden was seen as a “bad Democrat,” said Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist who has been a guest on one of the hosts’ spinoff podcast, “Pollercoaster.” But coming from “Pod Save America,” the case for a new candidate wasn’t so easily dismissed.

“They were people you could point to who are serious people who are undeniably committed Democrats — true and proud partisans,” Cass said.

As prominent politicians, commentators and donors began to pressure Biden to leave the ticket, the president’s campaign sent out a fundraising email castigating “self-important podcasters” for sowing doubt about the state of the race.

Today, the hosts — Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor — are self-effacing about the role they played in the historic swap this summer for Vice President Kamala Harris, framing it as a responsibility to their listeners.

“The conversation we had is a reflection about what everybody was saying, and not just pundits,” Lovett said in a recent interview, on a scorching late summer afternoon in Phoenix.

Pfeiffer added, “None of the people who possibly were having any conversations with Biden were in our group chats.”

But the men had offered up, to use an Obama-era term, a permission structure — the necessary space for Democrats to talk publicly about what had once been unsayable.

The #Resistance moment

“Pod Save America” soared to national prominence after the 2016 election, when galvanized liberals and moderates poured money into progressive causes and organized mass protests. That broad movement against Trump’s presidency became known as the #Resistance.

Many of the media stars of that charged moment (think: the Krassenstein brothers, Michael Avenatti, Lauren Duca, Tom Arnold, Louise Mensch) have either flamed out or faded into irrelevance. And many voters have reported feelings of “anti-Trump burnout” and resistance fatigue.

But the hosts of “Pod Save America” have kept their audience engaged, and growing, through candid conversations like the one that followed Biden’s debate and with the credibility conferred on them by their close ties to national Democrats.

Seven years later, the hosts of “Pod Save America” are celebrities, of a kind. They get recognized on the street, an experience Lovett — who for years was part of a media power couple with journalist Ronan Farrow, and who featured, briefly, on the new season of “Survivor” — calls “deeply weird.” After George Clooney wrote a guest essay in the Opinion section of The New York Times about Biden’s frail condition at a Hollywood fundraiser, Favreau, who reportedly owns a $10 million home in Los Angeles, backed up the star’s account during an appearance on CNN.

And what was a shoestring operation in its early days has turned into Crooked Media, a liberal counterpart to right-wing political media giants like The Daily Wire and Breitbart.

Members of the Crooked staff of about 100 made the hosts’ already hectic summer even more complicated, when the wealth and status of the four men became a point of tension in a fight over a union contract.

In 2022, Crooked signed a multiyear agreement with SiriusXM — reported to be around $150 million — for distribution and ad sales. Later that year, the company announced an investment from Soros Fund Management, the investment firm started by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros.

Vote Save America, a fundraising and activism arm the hosts introduced in 2018, has raised nearly $60 million for progressive causes and Democratic candidates, which they apportion “based on competitiveness of the race and need of the candidate,” a spokesperson said.

A media company with a political action wing is unusual. But given the fraught relationship many devoted Democrats have developed with the mainstream press — which some fault for Trump’s continued popularity — it makes a certain kind of sense.

“That these famous and really articulate and powerful former Obama aides would also have a wing that puts their analysis into action to actually move the needle in the political system is completely congruent,” said Erik Wemple, the media critic at The Washington Post.

But just as the hosts and their podcast, with its 20 million monthly downloads, have become an institution in liberal politics, so, too, have they come to embody many of the tensions within the Democratic Party in 2024: between tactics and principles, between fearing Trump and ridiculing him, between the center and the progressive wing, and between the party elite and the grassroots.

Despite their fame, the “Pod Save America” hosts say they still consider themselves political staffers at heart. And even as the Democratic Party steered to the left after 2016 and back to the center again, the show kept the fire burning for President Barack Obama’s signature combination of lofty rhetoric and political pragmatism.

“They were the Obama government in exile for eight years,” said Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of the news site Semafor. (Smith was formerly a media columnist at The New York Times.)

The tone of “Pod Save America” has stayed remarkably consistent over time, moving like a metronome between two modes: informed, familiar, Joss Whedon-esque patter about the political news of the day, interlaced with earnest appeals to the fundamental goodness of American democracy and the existential threat they say is posed by Trump.

Like the so-called resistance, the show had a natural arc, one that might have ended when Biden won the 2020 election.

The hosts say they never considered hanging it up.

“Trump didn’t come out of nowhere,” Lovett said in Phoenix, over empanadas. “If Trump had lost in 2016, that movement would have been a threat. If Trump had won in 2020, that movement would have been a threat. Each election is telling us where we are as a country, and they all told us it was really close and there’s a lot of work we have to do.”

Emotional processing

At least since the morning after the 2016 election, a key part of the show’s appeal to its audience has been emotional, helping people who thought the American story had reached a happy ending with the election of its first Black president process their feelings of fear and grief.

“We should be very afraid,” Pfeiffer said on the Nov. 9, 2016, episode of the show, then called “Keepin’ It 1600” and produced by The Ringer.

Crucially, the hosts of “Pod Save America” have always tried to link those feelings to political action. To wit: A monthly recurring donation program through Vote Save America is called the Anxiety Relief Program — like “Pod Save America,” very tongue in cheek, but also more than a little bit sincere.

“The existence of Crooked Media is a way to give people a way to channel that emotion into something more constructive than Reddit,” Favreau said. (Although fans of the podcast also maintain a 46,000-strong subreddit, too.)

As with its counterparts on the right, Crooked Media is trying to arm its audience with a set of winning political arguments. In each listener, the “Pod Save America” hosts see a potential proselytizer.

“We are giving information and in some cases very specific messaging advice to all of our listeners who then go out and have all those conversations,” Pfeiffer said. “Because all the research shows that the most persuasive messenger is someone you know or trust.”

Friends of the pod

The day before Biden’s catastrophic debate, hundreds of “Pod” fans lined up in New York in the sweltering early summer heat, flush with excitement about Democratic politics.

Once inside the Brooklyn Paramount theater, and buzzed off mojitos and rosé, the sold-out crowd held a resistance revival.

The audience roared as the hosts took the stage. It booed as the show opened with a video of Trump’s most recent inflammatory statements. And the crowd — mostly white, mostly millennial and Generation X, and some wearing well-loved “Friend of the Pod” T-shirts, which became a kind of liberal fashion statement in 2017 — exploded in cheers when the video cut to some of Biden’s best moments from the 2020 debate.

This was fundamentally the same drama that “Pod Save America” has staged since its inception: one in which Trump is as much the main character of American politics as Lucifer is of “Paradise Lost” — a charismatic evildoer generating all the conflict and getting all the best lines, pitted against the very forces of goodness itself.

“Donald Trump poses a unique threat to the country and to democracy,” Favreau said on a recent show while discussing the strategic benefit of former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., endorsing Harris. “The argument about the threat he poses to our fundamental freedoms and to the country has to be front and center.”

A ‘sense of their own righteousness’

The loyalty of this audience has made “Pod Save America” an important platform for Democratic politicians. This year alone, guests have included Bernie Sanders, Tim Walz, Gretchen Whitmer, Doug Emhoff, Tammy Baldwin and Raphael Warnock. This year, Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia lawmaker who ran for governor in 2018, started a podcast on Crooked Media for just this reason. (In the 2020 cycle, Vote Save America drove volunteers and money to Abrams’ anti-voter-suppression group Fair Fight Action, which some Democrats credit with helping Biden win in Georgia.)

“Their audience and their staying power matter,” Abrams said. “What ‘Pod’ and Crooked have done so effectively is remind this community that politics don’t disappear simply because the election is over.”

But there are those who find the entire package tough to take. The hosts are all white guys, speaking to a party that is increasingly female and nonwhite. And the slick presentation of a one-stop shop for democracy strikes others as glib.

“They’ve created this safe space for liberals and suffused them with a sense of their own righteousness,” said Julie Mason, who hosts a national political talk show for Sirius, and who sparred with Vietor when she covered the Obama White House. “It astonishes me how far these guys have been able to go just on the basis of having worked for Obama.” (For his part, Pfeiffer addresses the echo chamber criticism by pointing to the hosts’ strategy of turning listeners into messengers.)

Some more left-leaning critics take issue with the way the hosts and their guests seem at times to conflate the fight to protect democracy with the fight to elect Democratic candidates.

On a June episode, the hosts interviewed Addisu Demissie, a Democratic strategist, about Biden’s executive order to close the border. Demissie, a frequent guest on the podcast, advised progressives who were upset about the restrictive policy to “take a little bit of settle-down juice” given the electoral stakes.

On the Sept. 8 show, after former Vice President Dick Cheney announced his support for Harris, Lovett dismissed criticism of the endorsement as “online,” that is, not politically serious.

“It’s this sort of this formally idealistic but fundamentally hollow liberal idealism that is mostly form rather than substance,” Daniel Denvir, the host of “The Dig,” a popular left-wing podcast, said of “Pod Save America.”

In other areas, though, most notably regarding Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, one host has poked his head out. Vietor frequently criticizes the conduct of the Israeli government on “Pod Save the World,” the foreign policy podcast he co-hosts with former Obama foreign policy hand Ben Rhodes.

Recently, journalist Glenn Greenwald — no fan of the Democratic establishment — called a discussion between Vietor and Rhodes about Israel’s attacks in Lebanon “surprisingly clear and unflinching.”

Still, Vietor’s candor is not always met with appreciation from the podcast’s fans. A recent 2,500-word post on the “Pod Save America” subreddit titled “Tommy’s Consistently Problematic Analysis of Gaza” bemoaned Vietor’s “blind spots” in his criticism of Israel.

Facing Trump again

A common critique of Obama’s post-presidency is that he has seemed more interested in creating glossy content and palling around with celebrities than attending to the concerns of the working Americans who helped elect him twice.

In August, during the final stages of a union contract negotiation at Crooked Media, Bloomberg reported on friction between rank-and-file workers and the hosts over a range of issues, including their wealth. (The hosts declined to share their salaries.)

“What we saw in that article is what always happens at the end of a negotiation,” said Lucinda Treat, the CEO of Crooked Media. (In August, the union ratified a contract that guaranteed an $80,000 minimum salary, and at least 49 days of paid time off.)

In an interview, Favreau said he faced the same challenge as much of the “upper echelon of the Democratic Party” — keeping in touch with the constituencies that will build a winning coalition for Democrats.

“I spend a lot of time watching focus groups,” he said. “We all do.”

The hosts also make a point to canvass when they are on tour, as they did in Phoenix in August, before a live taping of their show. Plans to door-knock had to be canceled because of the extreme heat — it had been over 100 degrees for some 100 consecutive days in the region.

Nevertheless, the hosts spent the morning rallying volunteers and appearing with local candidates, including two Arizona state representatives, Lorena Austin and Seth Blattman, a furniture manufacturer who said he had decided to run for office in 2022 after listening to “Pod Save America”; and then with Amish Shah, a physician running in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District.

Outside an Arizona Democratic Party campaign office in a strip mall in Phoenix, the hosts posed for photos with fans and cut social media content with Shah. “They’re a huge draw,” he said.

That night at the Celebrity Theater, the crowd was less white than the one in Brooklyn, and more female.

Before the show, in the lounge, a 38-year-old aspiring screenwriter named T.Y. Evans explained that he had become a fan of the show during a recent stint behind bars, when “Pod Save America” was one of the few podcasts he could get on his prison tablet. In particular, Evans said, he liked how often Crooked Media released new content. (Since January, the hosts have recorded three new episodes of the show a week.)

Also, he couldn’t stand Trump.

“I hate him pretty bad,” Evans said. “He’s the defiler in chief.”

At the beginning of the show, Lovett, Favreau and Vietor emerged wearing their elder millennial uniform: snug T-shirts, slim-fit pants and white sneakers. (Pfeiffer, 48, wore a button-down.)

It was once again the eve of a debate, this time between Trump and Harris, who the hosts say has made their job much easier by generating enthusiasm within the party.

The new ticket has done that partly with new rhetoric, dismissing Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as “weird.” It’s a change in tone from years of Democratic messaging about the fearsome implications Trumpism holds for American democracy — messaging that helped raise “Pod Save America” to its current perch.

“The truth is he’s a clown, who, if given absolute power, would be very dangerous,” Lovett said.

For all the angst about Trump, the hosts say they haven’t given too much thought to how the show would be affected by another victory by the former president in November.

“That’s a meeting we need to have on the books, and we just don’t do it,” Favreau said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.