Research

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.

White nationalism has become increasingly visible in American public life1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. Yet we lack knowledge of the predictors and prevalence of explicit support for this ideology, as survey research has treated it as a latent construct captured through indirect indicators11,12,13,14,15. We introduce and validate a measure that informs respondents of the core tenets of the white nationalist movement and then asks whether they support the movement. Expressed support is distinct from organizational affiliation with the movement, which we do not measure. Here we show with three national surveys of non-Hispanic white adults (conducted from 2021 to 2025) that support for white nationalism is (1) higher among white people encountering personal hardship and local social distress, consistent with strain theories3,16; (2) unrelated to local racial composition or recent demographic change, complicating status threat accounts4,17,18; and (3) elevated among white people with close friendships primarily online, consistent with theories of extremism driven by online mobilization7,10,19. Support for white nationalism is more common among white people with lower incomes and education, Republicans and conservatives, and those who are politically disaffected. In our national probability sample, prevalence of support was estimated at 4.9% of white adults, including 13.5% of white men aged 18–29. Support for white nationalism seems to constitute a discrete dimension of white racial attitudes, and many white people who endorse its core ideas are unaware of the label.