Americans are tired of talking heads and the opinions of editorialists masquerading as journalists. But this should not be confused with declining interest in news or politics; viewers are simply moving to channels where they can get an unfiltered view of the candidates from personalities they trust.

If there is one clear lesson from the 2024 election cycle, it’s that candidates for public office must be prepared to engage in this new media landscape to stay competitive, especially on long-form podcasts.

The last time we had a shift this significant was 1960, when America saw the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Kennedy-Nixon debate underscored the power of television to shape public perception.

Remember, past is prologue. Take, for example, Donald Trump’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Already, it’s racked up about 45 million views—just on YouTube alone. Trump’s interview with Theo Von received 14 million views. For her part, Kamala Harris’ appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast received 733,000 views and she received 665,000 views on the “All the Smoke” podcast.

While traditional media audiences are shrinking, these appearances have outperformed the average audiences of these podcasts oftentimes 10 to 1. Remarkably, the candidates’ episodes are even outpacing episodes featuring internationally known Hollywood celebrities.

Voters are hungry to hear from the candidates on an unfiltered, authentic platform, and podcasts are filling that need.

This shift is redefining how viable candidates will approach media going forward. Those who want to succeed in politics but are afraid, or unable, to allow the public a view into who they really are going to have a ceiling on their career if they don’t do long-form interviews.

Political campaigns are going to change in two ways due to this dynamic.

1. Candidates need to get comfortable in their own skin, open up and answer personal questions about heartache, addiction, and what makes their spouse smile. This open, honest, and unvarnished content mirrors what the public is receiving in their social media feeds already, so it makes sense that they are demanding the same transparency from their political leaders.
2. It’s going to transform the way political professionals engage with the electorate. According to GWI, a consumer research company, the “typical” internet user spends almost 2.5 hours each day using social media platforms, equating to more than one-third of their total time online. As a result, campaign resources should shift to talking to the electorate where they are spending their time, which is on their phone. That is where people are getting their news, listening to podcasts, vegging out, and forming opinions about who they will vote for.

The reason these podcasters and creators carry so much influence is because of the community and trust they build with their audience. As James Clear, author of The New York Times bestseller of “Atomic Habits,” says about changing opinions, “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does.”

This election year, I was part of an effort that enlisted thousands of podcasters and social media personalities to encourage unregistered and low propensity voters to engage in the political process. Content creators in coordination with Vote4America delivered billions of impressions to tens of millions of voters. The posts calling on people to engage in the election significantly overperformed the average post of the creator, much like the success of the Trump and Harris podcast appearances.

We won’t know the full effect of all this content until all the votes are counted, but we can already see that 8.5% of all early votes are being cast by previously eligible first-time voters, meaning they are of age to have voted in past elections but decided not to.

The authenticity and trust of these podcasters and content creators is clearly having an effect on voter behavior.

What Jeff Bezos got wrong was his slight at podcasts as “unresearched.” The public clearly disagrees.

Americans are choosing podcasts over Bezos’ newspaper as their trusted source of news and information. Traditional media and candidates for office now must grapple with the new expectations of the electorate: unfiltered, unedited, authentic content.

The Justice Department sued Virginia after it removed the names of 6,303 aliens and Alabama after it moved 3,251 aliens to an “inactive” list.

Keep in mind that it’s a felony under several federal statutes for an alien to claim fraudulently to be a citizen so he or she may register to vote or vote in U.S. elections, including 18 U.S.C. §§ 611, 911, and 1015(f). The Justice Department has a duty to enforce these statutes, something the agency apparently has no interest in doing under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The federal voter registration form established by the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, not only asks applicants whether they are U.S. citizens, it requires them to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.

The form has a strict warning that if the would-be voter provides false information, he or she may “be fined, imprisoned, or (if not a U.S. citizen) deported from or refused entry to the United States.”

However, the Justice Department claims that Virginia and Alabama violated the law’s 90-day preelection deadline for “systematic” list maintenance programs. This, according to the DOJ led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, prevents all “systematic” removals from a voter registration list within 90 days of an election.

What the Justice Department fails to point out is that the 90-day deadline is in the second part of a section of the National Voter Registration Act that deals only with the removal of the names of registered voters who have moved.

The first part outlines the rule for removing the names of individuals who have moved to a different residence either within the state or another state. The second part then applies the 90-day deadline for such removals.

That section of the law also says that the deadline doesn’t apply to “correction of registration records” or to removal of names of voters who have requested it or who have died or become ineligible due to a criminal conviction or mental incapacity.

The common factor in all of those exceptions is that each deals with individuals who were eligible to vote when they registered but subsequently became ineligible.

The 90-day deadline obviously doesn’t apply to an alien who wasn’t eligible to register to vote in the first place and, in fact, was committing a felony violation of federal criminal law by registering.

Critics, including the Justice Department, have claimed that those exceptions are the “exclusive” reasons that a state may remove the names of registered individuals from the voter rolls.

In 2012, in Arcia v. Detzner, a federal case out of the Southern District of Florida, Judge William Zloch said that claim would “produce an absurd result.”

Zloch ruled that would mean a state couldn’t “remove from its voting rolls minors, fictitious individuals, individuals who misrepresent their residence in the state, and non-citizens.”

The 90-day deadline, the judge decided, “simply does not apply to an improperly registered noncitizen.”

In another 2012 federal case, U.S. v. Florida, Judge Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida concluded that Congress drafted these provisions of the law to deal with the removal of names of registered voters “on grounds that typically arise after an initial proper registration.” The provisions don’t apply to “revocation of an improperly granted registration of a noncitizen,” Hinkle ruled.

In fact, the judge wrote, “the NVRA does not require a state to allow a noncitizen to vote just because the state did not catch the error more than 90 days in advance.”

Moreover, the Justice Department is also wrong in claiming that the law bars all “systematic” removals of voters’ names.

As Hinkle ruled, during the 90-day period “a state may pursue a program to systematically remove registrants on request or based on a criminal conviction, mental incapacity, or death but not based on a change of residence.”

What “matters here,” the federal judge added, “is this: none of this applies to removing noncitizens who were never properly registered in the first place.”

It is true that in a deeply flawed, cursory analysis, a divided panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Southern District of Florida decision and held that the 90-day deadline did apply to the removal of aliens’ names from voter rolls.

But Florida didn’t appeal this obviously wrong decision by two appeals court judges to the entire 11th Circuit or to the Supreme Court. The 11th Circuit panel’s decision not only is wrong based on the text of the statute, but any interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act that would force a state to allow an ineligible alien who violated criminal law by registering to remain registered so he may cast a ballot in an upcoming election likely would render the law unconstitutional.

In 2019, in Bellitto v. Snipes, another case arising out of Florida, a different 11th Circuit panel held that in applying the NVRA, “Congress would not have mandated that the state register” an individual who “is not eligible to vote.”

If the NVRA does not require a state to register an ineligible alien to vote, it cannot be construed to require a state to maintain and continue the registration of an ineligible alien.

Alabama and Virginia should fight the Justice Department and be willing to take these cases all the way to the Supreme Court. Maintaining the security and integrity of the American election process and protecting voters against foreign interference that voids their votes requires no less.

Read Hans von Spakovsky’s complete Legal Memorandum: “The National Voter Registration Act Does Not Prevent States From Removing Aliens from Voter Registration Rolls at Any Time.”

Those numbers are not surprising to anyone who consumes a lot of political media. Tune into the establishment-friendly press and you’ll be inundated with stories about voter suppression in red states, recaps of the most dramatic skirmishes that happened outside the Capitol on January 6, and warnings about how Trump and his allies could actually take power after losing the upcoming election.

The fear, from the establishment’s perspective, is that after losing, Trump will successfully pressure Republican legislators in battleground states to appoint “alternate” electors that will keep Harris below the 270 electoral votes needed to win, which would send the election to the likely Republican-controlled House.

Without very explicit evidence of decisive voter fraud that the political class outright ignores, it’s hard to see a scheme like this working—considering that Trump isn’t already in power, Democrats have passed laws in recent years making it harder to appoint alternate electors, and many of the Republican legislators Trump would rely on have shown a reluctance to go along with the former president absent strong pressure from their constituents. But that hasn’t stopped the fear-mongering.

On the other side, the Trump-friendly alternative media is full of stories about local and state officials overturning election security laws, deleting drop box surveillance footage, actively registering non-citizens to vote, losing entire trays of mail-in ballots, and other tales of vote manipulation and even outright fraud.

Pair these stories with all the left’s freakouts about “voter suppression” in red states and the various assertions of foreign influence operations and it’s easy to see how so many voters became convinced that a victory by the other side would be illegitimate. Now add the establishment panic about a MAGA plot to overturn the election if they lose and the right’s awareness of the political establishment’s preparations to do the exact same thing had they lost in 2020 and it becomes clear why many are worried about what awaits us after election day.

The collapse of the public’s trust in elections mirrors the collapse in trust in several other institutions, like the federal judicial system, public health authorities, and the news media. While uncomfortable, the public losing trust in untrustworthy institutions is a good thing. It’s a necessary first step if the country is ever going to get on a better path.

The federal justice system has been used to go after the establishment’s political enemies since the beginning, public health authorities demolished any credibility they may have had with their deadly, totalitarian response to COVID-19, and the American news media has been actively misinforming the public in politically-expedient ways for essentially it’s entire history.

In the past decade or so, the American public has developed a much healthier level of skepticism toward these institutions. It is perfectly reasonable for that skepticism to carry over to federal elections.

After all, the political class—which includes politically-connected businesses—is making trillions of dollars in revenue thanks to various wars, innumerable regulations that protect them from competition, easy money from the Fed, and other lucrative government programs. It is not much of a jump to assume that, if able, the very people who have repeatedly lied us into unnecessary wars to line their pockets would be willing to use whatever means necessary to expand and protect their power and profits.

Together with the establishment-friendly media, the political class has placed a very high social cost on questioning the security of our elections in every instance except when it conveniently places the blame on a foreign government that Washington wants to demonize. Questioning the legitimacy of elections is “dangerous” unless you’re accusing Russia or Iran.

And whenever someone with a big enough voice casts doubt on past elections in an “unacceptable” way, the establishment is quick to shout them down with the same meaningless denunciation that there is no evidence of “widespread” election fraud.

Of course, if there were to be a conspiracy to either foment or permit voter fraud in a way that successfully flipped a national election, it would not be “widespread,” it would be targeted. Elections like this one come down to a handful of precincts—most of which are toss-up suburban and rural areas that surround blue cities in swing states. A conspiracy to commit or allow “widespread” voter fraud would be pointless and all but guarantee its discovery.

This is not to say you should accept every claim made about voter fraud or even that there is definitive proof that any previous elections were stolen in this fashion. And it’s certainly not to say that violence is an appropriate or productive response if the upcoming election appears like it was stolen.

Only that it would be healthy for more members of the American public to start questioning whether our system really works the way we learned it did in elementary school—where the president represents our collective will and acts as we would act to address the problems we face at home and abroad.

That simple story is an illusion that conveniently frames whatever the government is doing to us as an embodiment of everyone’s wishes and any opposition as a selfish stand against what everybody else wants. Many Americans are appropriately questioning a lot of what they’ve previously accepted as true. They ought to question this too.

Image Source: Mises Institute. Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.