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Abstract
In the 2024 election, the gender gap among young voters widened sharply. To examine the role of podcasts in this pattern, we combine two survey datasets with the first large-scale analysis of political content from leading U.S. podcasts, covering 36,659 episodes in 2024. We introduce and demonstrate the occurrence of gendered media spaces, digital entertainment environments where preferences for masculine or feminine content, rather than political ideology, sort audiences and expose men and women to systematically different political messages on non-political podcasts. We examine the extent to which candidate podcast appearances align with gendered interests versus ideology, and whether exposure to conservative content on podcasts is correlated with Trump vote choice among young men. Our results suggest that podcasts are one potentially relevant feature of the media environment surrounding the widening youth gender gap, though they appear to only account for a small portion of the change.