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Inflation, Healthcare, and Abortion Dominate Podcast Content Ahead of Midterm Elections

It’s been two years since the presidential election, which means midterm elections are upon us.
This year, 34 senate seats and all 435 house seats are up for grabs. With the midterm primaries over, both Democrats and Republicans are preparing for the general election on November 8 that will determine who will control Congress for the next two years.

Whether or not you’re not paying close attention to politics, it’s difficult to understand what issues are most important to the voters this election.

TL;DR:

  • “Inflation” is the top issue ahead of midterm elections, taking the number one spot in both total number of podcasts and episodes.
  • “Healthcare” claims the number two spot for podcast title/description mentions while “Abortion” comes in fourth, behind “Inflation” for estimated total reach.
  • In a battle of party figureheads, “Biden” is narrowly mentioned more than “Trump” in both total number of podcasts and episodes.
  • “Culture War” and “Gun Control” have the fewest mentions across all categories, including podcasts, episodes, and total reach.
  • “Biden” and “Trump” have the highest estimated total reach at 66,876,461 and 43,494,619 respectively.

Table of Contents

Our Midterm Elections Keyword Selection Process

To help, we analyzed the data Podchaser Pro collects across the 5,000 most popular podcasts to see which midterm election issues are dominating podcasts. We scanned multiple media outlets, including The Washington Post, Ballotpedia, The New York Times, and election websites to hone in on a list of 13 keywords that are top of mind with voters. We reviewed those topics against podcast data to see what people are talking about using Podchaser transcription API and RSS feed descriptions. Using audience insights from Podchaser Pro, we enriched that data to provide a directional estimate for each keyword’s total reach.

How We Crunched the Numbers

Our data team looked at keyword mentions from August 10, 2022 to October 14, 2022 (60 days) across three key areas: (1) total number of unique episodes where a keyword is mentioned in an episode’s transcript or description/title, (2) total number of unique podcasts in which a keyword is mentioned in an episode’s transcript or description/title, and (3) episode reach for each podcast where a keyword was mentioned.

Midterm Elections Keywords Analyzed

We scanned episode transcripts and descriptions for the following keywords (in alphabetical order):

  1. Abortion
  2. Climate Change
  3. Culture War
  4. Gun Control
  5. Healthcare
  6. Immigration
  7. Inflation
  8. Marijuana
  9. Supreme Court
  10. Trump
  11. Biden
  12. Democrat
  13. Republican

Our Methodology

We used Podchaser Pro’s database to analyze keywords from transcript mentions and title/descriptions from August 10, 2022 to October 14, 2022 (60 days).

Our team looked at the:

  • Total number of unique episodes in which a keyword is mentioned in a transcript and title/description.
  • Total number of unique podcasts in which a keyword is mentioned in a transcript and title/description.
  • Episode reach for each podcast where a keyword was mentioned in a transcript and title/description. Podchaser tracks listener reach for each episode. To get total reach, we add the episode reach of all unique episodes where the target keyword was mentioned for a directional estimate of how many times the episodes were played.

Midterm Elections Keywords by Total Number of Unique Podcast Episode Mentions

Keywords have been ranked by the number of different episodes mentioning the keyword within the last 60 days.

  1. Inflation: 30,496
  2. Biden: 28,627
  3. Trump: 27,203
  4. Abortion: 21,780
  5. Healthcare: 18,543,
  6. Climate Change: 16,128
  7. Immigration: 13,277
  8. Supreme Court: 11,394
  9. Republican: 7,670
  10. Marijuana: 5,314
  11. Democrat: 3,639
  12. Gun Control: 1,477
  13. Culture War: 1,410

Midterm Elections Keywords by Total Number of Unique Podcast (Series) Mentions

Keywords have been ranked by the number of different podcasts that had at least one episode mentioning the keyword within the last 60 days.

  1. Inflation: 8,681
  2. Healthcare: 7,979
  3. Biden: 6,447
  4. Trump: 6,407
  5. Climate change: 5,832
  6. Abortion: 4,833
  7. Immigration: 4,237
  8. Supreme Court: 3,638
  9. Marijuana: 2,634
  10. Republican: 2546
  11. Democrat: 1,326
  12. Gun Control: 743
  13. Culture war: 722

Midterm Elections Keywords by Total Reach

Keywords have been ranked by the combined estimated reach of all of their episode mentions.

  1. Biden: 66,876,461
  2. Trump: 43,494,619
  3. Inflation: 32,628,789
  4. Abortion: 20,011,805
  5. Republican: 19,426,588
  6. Climate Change: 17,671,181
  7. Supreme Court: 13,192,765
  8. Democrat: 10,892,102
  9. Immigration: 10,580,518
  10. Healthcare: 9,378,360
  11. Marijuana: 6,624,933
  12. Culture War: 2,186,579
  13. Gun Control: 576,437

Final thoughts on Midterm Elections Keywords in Podcasts

More than any other medium, podcasting encapsulates word of mouth. Long form discussion and spoken word content provide nuanced, lengthy conversations on the topics that matter. By unlocking this content via Podchaser’s transcriptions and pairing it with Podchaser’s one-of-a-kind, advanced database of audience insights, we can quantify this word of mouth for the first time.

The results of our innovative data research suggest that inflation is the most-discussed topic in podcasts ahead of the midterm elections, closely followed by healthcare and abortion.

This research into election topics is just a glimpse at the power available when you partner with Podchaser. This same methodology can be used in various PR and business contexts such as market intelligence, competitor analysis, and more. One of the strongest use cases is podcast sponsor data, which is why we’ve built that into Podchaser Pro with our Sponsor History add-on.

Learn more about Podchaser Pro.

Request info about Podchaser’s podcast API.

Press Contact
Lia Parisyan, Marketing Manager at Podchaser
lia@podchaser.com
Podchaser Business Solutions Contact
Cole Raven, Chief Revenue Officer at Podchaser
cole@podchaser.com

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