Beyond the physical battlefield of a general election, where prospective MPs trudge through a constituency to hand out leaflets and try to pin down potential voters in conversation, there is the battlefield of the “narrative”. This tends to be won and lost in the media, where politicians fight for control of the message on the radio, on TV, in newspapers and on social media. This time around, they’ve had a new front to worry about. Britain’s podcast market is booming, with the total market projected to hit 28 million listeners by next year – double the amount from 2019.

Over the last couple of years, it’s seemed like a new UK politics podcast has launched every month. The two biggest, The Rest is Politics and The News Agents, are perpetually in the top five of Apple and Spotify’s podcast charts. The former – hosted by former Labour communications boss Alistair Campbell, and Rory Stewart, an author, former Tory minister and very keen walker – has set the tone since its launch in March 2022. It has about 700,000 listeners per episode; its live show sold out London’s Royal Albert Hall last year and is going to the O2 Arena in October. According to a recent episode of the BBC’s Media Show the hosts, benefitting from a deal which gives them a cut of advertising revenue, are rumoured to be paid up to a million a year each.

That success has inspired the launch of rival podcasts, like The News Agents, Political Currency and Electoral Dysfunction. The formula is broadly the same: two or three hosts, generally journalists or former politicians; interviews and analysis on the political issues of the day; and a bit of (sometimes forced) humour and rapport. Even former cabinet ministers have got involved: Political Currency is hosted by ex-Tory chancellor George Osborne and Labour’s Ed Balls. As with The Rest is Politics, their podcast is sold on the premise that getting together a left-winger and a right-winger will offer robust debate, and correct the modern tendency to not talk to people you disagree with. With Britain on the brink of a general election, all these podcasts have gone into a frenzy of audio production, sometimes dropping “emergency” episodes in order to analyse a particularly juicy Tory scandal as quickly as possible.

But what impact, exactly, will all those shows have on the election? With Labour averaging a 20-point poll lead over the Tories, no form of media is going to swing the result the way it could in a tight race. And the podcast format is “not yet a mass medium”, says Nic Newman, a senior research associate at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. During election season, The News Agents has had 10 million listens a month – or several hundred thousand per episode, a bit under half that of The Rest is Politics. That’s more than the print circulation of most newspapers, but a lot less than the millions of viewers who tune into the evening news on TV.

These podcasts, Newman says, are “really catering to a particular group of people who are better educated, who are richer, and are interested in news and politics”. Many of them release episodes daily to give politics junkies their regular fix of Westminster drama. News Agents listeners “like behind-the-curtain stuff”, Emily Maitlis tells us, who is co-host alongside fellow ex-BBC journalists Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall. “They like us to dissect a scandal [...] they love exclusives. And they love all three of us together.”

After years as buttoned-up BBC correspondents, the News Agents hosts are now looser on the mic – they swear, they discuss their holidays and Maitlis’s dog – which reels in listeners on a personal level. As with all kinds of podcasts, fans of political shows often develop a parasocial relationship with the hosts. The PoliticsJOE Podcast launched last April as the house audio show of PoliticsJOE, a youth-focused digital media company that’s been producing YouTube videos since 2019. Co-host Ed Campbell says that their listeners make “the most insane memes about us”: scroll through the dedicated Reddit page and you’ll find AI-generated images of the trio, rounded out by Oli Dugmore and Ava Evans, “riding XL bullies across the Arctic wastes”.

Most major UK politics podcasts give off a heavy centrist dad vibe. Assemble all the hosts, and you’d have a room of mostly white, mostly middle-aged establishment veterans whose views generally lie near the centre. Few of them are likely to be fans of Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage. Alastair Campbell’s slogan for The Rest is Politics is that he and Stewart “disagree agreeably”. Sometimes it’s hard to find much disagreement on these shows at all, especially right now, when the view that the Tories should be kicked out of government is so overwhelming.

Listeners seem happy to wallow comfortably in these echo chambers. If you go through the viewing figures for episodes put up on YouTube or clips released on X – exact audience figures for individual podcasts aren’t public – it tends to be those about Tory armageddon that do best, rather than foreign news or gritty stuff about policy. Most of the shows just do opinion and analysis rather than reporting and breaking new stories. Because of this, they tend to amplify whatever narrative is going around Westminster, rather than actively shape it.

The News Agents does do its own reporting, such as travelling to Birmingham to interview Akhmed Yakoob, a popular, Andrew Tate-supporting TikTokker running against Labour in one seat. And, Maitlis says, the podcast tries to resist most clicky stories. “We know that Russia [and] Ukraine doesn’t yield particularly good audiences for us […] and yet we work against it. We say, ‘You know what, we think it’s important, we’re going to do it anyway.’” Accordingly, the team has been in France recently to cover the country’s parliamentary elections. She also rejects the centre-left characterisation. “Accountability tends to be with who has the power,” she says. “If the government switches in a week’s time, then [Labour] will be our focus. What are they getting right? What are they getting wrong? What are they going to do instead of the Rwanda policy? What are they going to do about the junior doctor strikes?”

Where many of these podcasts do shine is in long-form interviews with guests, which often stretch for more than an hour. The medium’s “great strength”, says The Rest is Politics’ Rory Stewart, is that it can go in-depth into issues, “and to do so slowly, with presenters who are unguarded and uncensored”. Rather than the “gotcha style of interviewing” associated with traditional broadcasting, like Radio 4’s Today, hosts and guests have the space for something a bit more expansive – and revealing. Leading, a Rest is Politics spin-off show that focuses on interviews, has grilled many top Labour politicians, like deputy leader Angela Rayner, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and health secretary Wes Streeting. Though Keir Starmer’s team are generally tight-lipped about what they’ll do in power, in extended interviews they sometimes open up a bit and explain their thinking. Shadow education minister Bridget Phillipson, for example, described Labour’s shadow cabinet as “the most class-conscious” Britain has had for some time in her Leading interview, seemingly contradicting Starmer’s preoccupation with winning over wealthy voters and big business.

The other strength of podcasts – and one that will have lasting importance in elections to come – is their demographics. For all the general centrist dad vibes, these shows have strikingly young audiences. According to a recent report from the Reuters Institute, 55% of 25-34-year-olds and 58% of 18-24-year-olds listened to a podcast in the last month, compared to 32% of 45-55-year-olds and just 20% of those 55 or older. “The people who were watching me when I was in Washington on the 10 o’clock news were north of 60,” Sopel says, but with The News Agents he now gets “incredible engagement” from young people. “I went to grab a coffee the other day, and this young guy, he must have been barely 19 years old, says, ‘Oh my god, I’ve seen you on TikTok.’”

Dugmore, the PoliticsJOE Podcast editor and co-host, says that 80% of its audience is under 40, and that the show has been getting a quarter of a million downloads a month over election season. The average completion rate per episode is half an hour or more. This, he says, “runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of the time that people”, particularly young people, “only want short-form content”.

Only 38% of 18-25-year-olds say they’re certain to vote in this election, compared with the 60% for all UK adults. This is a huge, untapped section of the electorate – and one that new media, more so than traditional platforms like newspapers, radio and TV, have considerable influence over. Podcasts are one side of the story. TikTok is another. Podcasts will shape the future political preferences of an influential group of affluent, well-educated young people, and likely influence just how long a possible Labour government manages to stay in power.

The impact of TikTok may be more immediate. Nigel Farage, leader of the hard-right Reform party, has 812,000 followers, far more than any other UK politician or political party. His chatty, geezery content is being lapped up by young right-leaning voters – multiple polls have Reform ahead of the Tories among 18-to-25-year-olds, though still a very long way behind Labour. And because of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, the right-wing vote being split lets Labour and the Lib Dems win more seats.

“I think politicians neglect this alternative media ecosystem at their peril,” says Dugmore. “There are politicians that interact with it and understand it: Rory Stewart is one, Nigel Farage is another. [And] when they do interact with it, they build themselves these massive audiences. Rory Stewart is now in a position that I think basically any politician would kill for. Twice a week, he speaks into a microphone and millions of people listen to what he has to say.”