Anand Shah ‘25

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

As the 2024 Election Day draws closer, both major candidates are increasing their campaign activity, which reflects the end of the Presidential Race— a too-close-to-call sprint to Nov. 5th, with Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly having raised over $100 million in September alone, according to campaign staff in a meeting with donors.

Numerous alternative campaigning strategies are being utilized to target different voter populations. While these strategies are effective in reaching voters, they fail to provide a nuanced understanding of a candidate, and as such, should not entirely replace mainstream campaigning. Alternative campaigning came into recent focus with Harris’s appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy, which explores relationship advice from both serious and comedic viewpoints. Therefore, some felt that the appearance of Harris on the podcast was distracting from the series’ purpose, as Craig Agranoff described in an interview with Newsweek. Others have argued that because the podcast is traditionally non-partisan, Harris was able to tap into the podcast’s popularity (Call Her Daddy is the most listened-to podcast on Spotify amongst women and recently became the most listened-to podcast on Spotify) with an often-ignored demographic of younger undecided voters, as a review by The Hill notes.

In prior elections, no candidate ever appeared on podcast interviews and other forums that appealed to younger voters in the way Harris has. However, candidates run the risk of oversimplifying their message and omitting details, which has been a prominent accusation of Harris’s campaign. Instead, Trump has elected to appeal to more conservative voters by adhering to more formal interviews, albeit most frequently with networks such as Fox News, which, according to the Ad Fontes media scale that measures media bias, is “strongly right-leaning.” Trump, however, does frequently use X and his own social media platform Truth Social to comment on current happenings in the political landscape.

In a social media-oriented world, podcast appearances and snapshot summaries of politicians’ stances are increasingly popular. While this development is certainly effective in promoting recognition of a candidate, alternative campaigning can only succeed when pursued in conjunction with more detailed, significant platforms.