Their show reaches 1.5 million Americans and has been dubbed the left’s answer to conservative talk radio. Ahead of a blockbuster European tour, the former Obama staffers talk about becoming a voice of the resistance

It has been called the new Daily Show, “cooler than cool”, and “the left’s answer to conservative talk radio”, and has become a top destination for any Democrat thinking of running against Donald Trump in 2020.

Pod Save America is a podcast featuring Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor: former aides to Barack Obama who left the White House for Hollywood, whose show now reaches an average of 1.5 million Americans per episode and sells out live events across the US. This month, it is coming to London.

Jon Lovett of Pod Save America. Photograph: Publicity image

“They’re the ‘it boys’ of podcasting,” said Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times who is now a Guardian contributor. “They have the young liberal demographic sewn up in the same way [then Daily Show host] Jon Stewart did on cable in 2000. It’s the show everyone wants to be on.”

Recent guests have included Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, senators competing to capture liberal hearts ahead of potential presidential bids.

Of course, the show’s hosts have White House credentials of their own. Favreau was Obama’s star speechwriter, Lovett his chief joke writer, Pfeiffer his White House communications director and Vietor his spokesman for the National Security Council, among other roles.

In the show, the four men have done more than capitalise on the lasting aura of their old boss: they have identified a hunger for emotional support in uncertain times. They attempt to soothe, inspire and amuse that part of America that is disenchanted with politics. Many of their listeners are millennials entering the political fray for the first time, brought in by the appeal of Bernie Sanders and a desire to fight back against Trump.

People tell us, ‘You’ve helped me stay sane in what feels like an insane period of time' Tommy Vietor

Vietor said: “I think a lot of people see what’s happening in the United States, they read Trump’s tweets, they see him needlessly antagonizing a nuclear arms dictator and they think, ‘What the hell is going on? This is crazy.’ And I think there’s a cathartic effect in getting together with a group of people who also feel that way.

“That’s always been a big part of the show. People tell us, ‘You’ve helped me stay sane in what feels like an insane period of time.’”

London is the last stop on a European tour, following shows in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The quartet will be podcasting live in back-to-back shows at Cadogan Hall on Saturday: the 950-seat venue is sold out.

Is this a test of whether they can take their brand of lefty politics global? Vietor offered a simple explanation: “We thought it would be fun.”

‘The opposite of rightwing rage’

In the US, podcasting is more popular than ever before. Listener figures have doubled from 2013 to 2017, according to Edison Research, and the audience is younger, more educated and wealthier than the American population as a whole. Regular listeners spend more than five hours a week on five different podcasts, rivalling the time most Americans spend watching TV.

Ann Friedman, a journalist and podcast creator, said: “What podcasting is going through now is what happened when bigger media organisations got wise to blogging. In the past year there’s not necessarily more listeners but there’s definitely more money and definitely more attention being paid to it from established media companies.”

After leaving the White House, the people behind Pod Save America wanted to make a contribution to the anti-Trump resistance. And so Pod Save America was born, as the flagship offering of Crooked Media, the company started by Favreau, Lovett and Vietor last January.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, in the Oval Office in 2012. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

On the left of US politics, vigorous debate continues over how to respond to the forces that got Trump elected. Many such arguments mirror discussions in the Labour party in the UK, as the left responds to populism, disenchantment with the market economy and conflicting views over the role of identity politics.

Nikki Usher, who teaches a class on the future of media at the George Washington University, said Pod Save America was “unabashedly trying to create an alternative leftwing media ecosystem that takes all of the lessons that have failed and repackages them for the kind of audiences that treat Obama as a hipster God versus the kind of wonky principled Democrats who sit around and debate policy”.

Conservative radio is a behemoth in terms of business and political influence, and Fox News is America’s most-watched cable news outlet. Attempts to replicate that kind of success on the left have not fared well – from Al Gore’s Current TV to the Air America radio network, which declared bankruptcy in 2010. After years of lackluster ratings, MSNBC, the left’s answer to Fox on cable, has pivoted back towards the center.

People are angry right now, but I think liberals like to be inspired Jon Favreau

“I don’t know what the opposite of rightwing rage is,” Usher said, “but whatever that is I think that’s what the Crooked Media company is trying to take advantage of.”

The founders of Pod Save America say they hope its humor, insider-knowledge and drive for collective action will make it a mobilizing force. They are advocates, not passive documenters of elections, for instance helping promote Democratic candidates ahead of the party’s impressive performance in Virginia last November. But they also seek to inform with facts, a role traditionally reserved for press.

Favreau recently spoke to Ezra Klein, another young liberal media entrepreneur who left a high perch at the Washington Post to run the political website Vox. “I’m not going to pretend I’m a bloodless analyst who can leave all my personal opinions behind,” he said.

Instead he wants to galvanize people who agree with him. “People are angry right now, but I think liberals like to be inspired,” Favreau added. “I still believe that.”

Such work will only increase ahead of November’s midterm elections, when Democrats hope to retake the House and Senate.

‘White men speaking about politics’

Pod Save America is fresh, even radical. But stepping back, it’s still four white guys seeking to reshape the future of Democratic politics as the party is trying to diversify itself.

Research has shown that in the emergence of the political blogosphere, an earlier techno-media innovation, top influencers were white males, typically with an Ivy League or advanced education. Today, the top influencers on political Twitter fit the same profile.

Tommy Vietor, who worked as an Obama spokesman. Photograph: Publicity image

With “each new technological distribution”, Usher said, “the patterns of dominance continue despite what we might think about the potential for new voices to shine”.

“I do think there’s still a perception that white men speaking about politics is politics and anybody else speaking about politics is identity politics,” said Friedman, a co-host of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast who has been a guest on a Pod Save America spinoff and remains a fan of the show.

“I listen to plenty of podcasts led by voices that are not white guys that are just not coded as general politics.”

Growing pains are inevitable. The problem is structural and Vietor and his co-founders, who cut their teeth working for and to elect the first black president, acknowledge as much. As Crooked Media has expanded, they have diversified the backgrounds of their writers, guests and co-hosts.

Mark Feldstein, a veteran investigative journalist who is now a professor at the University of Maryland, encouraged the experimentation of ventures like Pod Save America.

“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” he said. “There’s nothing so sacrosanct about all the media forms we’ve had heretofore.”