Everyone Hates Him. Why Is His Podcast so Popular?

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After the 2024 presidential election, I decided to try to make sense of the moment by listening to a full week of Steve Bannon’s podcast. It was, frankly, a slog, even listening at 1.5x speed: Bannon’s show produced an intimidating amount of content, and the relentless outrage, from both guests and hosts, made for an exhausting listening experience. But I did come away from the week with an understanding of Bannon’s appeal as a podcaster. He has a sort of bizarre rumpled charisma—the strange, compelling intensity of a man who has either had a mental break or discovered the dark secrets of the world. Bannon has both an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s fury, and when he promises to guide listeners along the coming revolution or expose the workings of the deep state, there’s a certain fantastical thrill to imagining being a part of his universe.

Which is to say I understand the draw of the righteous, angry conservative podcast—or at least I thought I did. But recently, I learned something that made me question my understanding of the podcasting world—and everything I thought I knew about humanity: Sen. Ted Cruz, it turns out, is a massively popular podcaster.

Cruz would not have been the first lawmaker I’d expect to have a big podcast following. Cruz is often described as one of the most off-putting men in Washington, even by fellow Republicans. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” Sen. Lindsey Graham once joked. “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” former Speaker of the House John Boehner said. George W. Bush said simply: “I just don’t like the guy.”

And it’s not just establishment Republicans who hold this view. Roger Stone wrote on social media that people who took “an instantaneous dislike to Ted Cruz” were “only saving time.” Donald Trump at one point called him a “nasty guy” whom “nobody likes.” (Trump would later happily accept Cruz’s support and bestow on him the nickname “Beautiful Ted.”)

Cruz knows how he comes off to his colleagues. “If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy,” he said at a 2015 debate. “But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done, and I will get you home.”

His unlikability is treated as established fact at this point.

And yet, Cruz’s podcast, Verdict, leaves all other politicians’ podcasts in the dust. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has drawn a lot of media attention for his recently launched show, in part because of his guests, which have included Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. But data from the podcast analytics platform Podscribe, highlighted by the researcher Kyle Tharp, has Newsom’s with just 440,000 estimated downloads a month. (Cruz brought this data to wider attention when he reposted Tharp’s research in an attempt to dunk on Newsom.) Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw has about 366,000. Cruz, on the other hand, has 1.5 million. No one else comes anywhere close.

And it’s not just a success in contrast to other politicians. Verdict ranks high on the charts, alongside the work of actual, full-time podcasters. In Apple’s news category, Verdict usually hangs in about the top 30 to 50 shows—ahead of full-time media personalities such as Alex Jones, Chuck Todd, Sean Hannity, and Jen Psaki. (Cruz’s office did not respond to a request for comment about his podcast’s audience, its demographics, or how he has built a successful podcast despite the public perception that he’s widely hated.)

So how, I wondered, did a politician known for his lack of charisma earn such a substantial following? Most celebrities build podcast audiences off the promise of a kind of intimacy and authenticity on which to build a parasocial relationship, the kind of one-sided bond that often naturally forms with a podcast host after hearing their thoughts piped directly into your ears. Most news shows promise principled nonpartisan analysis. Barring that, other successful political commentary shows at least offer bold and sometimes shocking stances. Cruz, as a politician who must always consider his next campaign, offers none of these. Instead, he offers a bland mix of statistics, personal anecdata, and standard right-wing views.

There are some practical reasons that may explain Cruz’s podcasting success: He’s been at it for a long time, having launched the show in January 2020 for the Trump impeachment trial, and he is consistent in his output, with shows three days a week. Listeners tend to reward podcasts for reliability. Texas is also a big media market, and the half-hour to 45-minute episodes are easily digestible.

But these factors alone don’t explain Cruz’s success. To work, the podcast has to stand up on its own to work. So to understand, I started listening. But after about four hours of listening, I have a theory of just how an anti-charismatic podcast host figured out his strategy.

At first, it was hard to get past the dull character of the show. His disdain for his opponents was constant, but filtered through a kind of limp Facebook post–style commentary. He always refers to the “Democrat Party,” for example, instead of the Democratic Party. He refers constantly to “nut jobs” and “crazies” in the party, but he does it without any kind of real heat. Of the episodes I listened to, he was his boldest in an Aug. 9 episode in which he bashed Jake Tapper for writing a book about the cover-up of the decline of Biden’s mental state. “When you talk about ‘full of crap,’ I really don’t think you’re being fair to crap,” he said, gesturing at fieriness without actually committing to it.

And when he tries to be more comedic, his scolding can get in the way: After making fun of the D.C. sandwich-thrower for “behaving like a 5-year-old” and wearing “incredibly tight shorts” that “look … like a costume” (of what, he did not say), he sternly insisted that “it is assault to throw anything at someone.”

Worse, he sometimes undermines his efforts by pointing out that he’s making a joke. “To put it in perspective, the Democrats are polling 6 points above gonorrhea and 9 points above Ebola,” he said at one point while discussing polling on party approval. “So that’s where their radical policies have taken them. And by the way, for the fact-checkers, I made those numbers up. I don’t actually know where either of those diseases poll.”

But over time, I started to understand the space Cruz was carving out in the podcast world: that of a smug debate kid who has found himself with actual power. This may not sound appealing at first blush, but there was something about how Cruz brought so much detail and knowledge of history to every topic covered in his podcast that was genuinely refreshing, when compared to the other loud voices of his party.

His segments include references to scandals from the Clinton era, tangents about the workings of the American Bar Association, and detailed breakdowns of the electoral politics of individual states. He speaks comfortably and with familiarity about statistics, dates, and court rulings. He also speaks in full sentences and uses formal language fitting legal argumentation. “Posse Comitatus bars the use of the U.S. military for civilian law enforcement, except when authorized by the Constitution or another provision of federal law,” he said in an Aug. 12 episode. “Importantly, however, the Department of Justice, in 1989, the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that found that President George Herbert Walker Bush could use the D.C. Guard to carry out law enforcement missions … and so this is an instance where the president is acting pursuant to his authority.”

This is a quite different approach from Donald Trump’s, whose policy digressions have included questions about whether you would rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted, or whose assessment of a Tesla included the immortal summation “everything’s computer.”

There are hints that Cruz’s show is aimed at the same MAGA audience as the other popular shows—its ads, for example, for gold currency, anti-woke cell service providers, products geared toward preppers, and Ivermectin and other ill-advised medical treatments. But the underlying energy is not that of the more conspiratorial Alex Jones types, who keep their audiences engaged by stirring up fear and outrage.

He may not give much away about the politics that make things happen, but when he does speak of it, he’s convincing in a way the MAGA pundits are not. When he stated with calm confidence that Texas will pass a gerrymandered redistricting bill because Democrats “don’t have the leverage,” there was reason to believe it wasn’t bluster.

But there’s something else in Cruz’s approach to politics that differs from some of the more shouty pundit-hosts: He breaks politics down as a matter of power and strategy, rather than arguing over good-versus-evil worldviews. He does attack Democrats’ policies, but he also portrays the main actors as being motivated by power, rather than getting bogged down by their alleged degeneracy. That, he makes it clear, is what the game is about.

When discussing the Texas redistricting bill, he argued that Republicans should draw state lines in their favor because Democrats would if they could. “The reason Texas is acting to do this is because it matters [to have] a Republican majority in the House,” he said. “We have a very slim majority right now. Electing five new Republicans will make a difference, will significantly increase the chances of keeping a Republican majority in the 2026 election.” Only after making the argument for a national power play did he throw in an argument that would justify the state-level actions: “It also reflects the values of the voters of Texas.”

His actual political insight may not be all that interesting. But it’s easy to see how Republican voters would appreciate this reassurance that they have a Machiavellian champion inside Congress. He doesn’t need to yell to get his listeners excited: It’s enough to show there’s a smart, competent man working to defeat their enemy.

In the end, I came away from my dive into Cruz’s podcast with some better understanding of his listeners but no appetite to hear any more. People like Bannon create intriguing alternate realities on their shows, even if they’re built on conspiracy theories and grotesque worldviews; there’s dark fascination in diving into their mirror worlds. Cruz, on the other hand, offers only a stiff, bitter view of actual political realities. His show, blessedly, never wore me out the way his more bombastic fellow conservative podcasters do. But the most common insults directed at Cruz—that he’s arrogant, vindictive, abrasive, and generally disagreeable—aren’t dispelled by this podcast. Luckily for Cruz, there seem to be enough Republicans out there who are tired by the incoherent ravings of MAGA’s biggest stars that you can hit success with a good recall for facts and legalese. Cruz has shown that it’s never been better to be a mean-spirited policy wonk.

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