Trump is Losing Barstool Conservatives

Dave Portnoy, Joe Rogan, and the Sports Bros Constituency

Democrats have a man problem. The gendered voting gap has widened as disaffected young men have trended Republican over the last several election cycles. You can read think piece after think piece advising Democrats how to reverse the trend, from creating a lefty version of Joe Rogan to moderating their policy stances.

What most seem to miss is the role played in that political lurch to the right by one particular, unexpected group: the sports commentariat. A number of prominent sportscasters turned to the right in reaction to trends in progressive politics, ultimately helping Donald Trump reclaim the White House in 2024. However, there are early signs that Trump is already alienating this key constituency, who will likely be free agents in the 2028 election.

Of course, the connection between sports media and right-wing politics is not new. The granddaddy of conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, once worked for the Kansas City Royals before his breakout success in radio. The same is true of Joe Rogan, whose color commentary for the UFC honed the skills he would later put to use in podcasting. Heck, even Ronald Reagan got his start in the 1930s as a baseball radio announcer (and claimed to be on the mic for the first instant replay in sports history).

But why would sports commentary, specifically, have this kind of political potential? It’s for the same reason that talk radio has had such an immense impact on politics over the last half century. As I once wrote for the New York Times, talk radio’s influence was tied to 1) its pervasiveness and 2) its parasocial power.

In short, for talk radio listeners, their favorite hosts provide a constant audio background to their lives. You can, if you so choose, listen to nothing but conservative talk radio programs all day, every day — in the shower, in the truck, from the workbench, etc — and never come close to catching all of the 1000s of hours of content being broadcast every week by 100s of hosts.

And when that kind of content permeates your life, it’s natural to develop what psychologists label a “parasocial relationship” with the person whose voice and ideas you have become so familiar with. You might hear more of that host’s thoughts than you do any person in your real life. It’s a one-sided relationship, of course, but talk radio fans can feel a kind of simulacrum of intimacy. Radio hosts cultivate these relationships, creating nicknames for their fans, inviting call-ins, sharing personal or family stories, and the like. And so, when those radio hosts make a political point, their listeners listen as they would to a friend or trusted acquaintance.

Now, think about how sports commentary — in particular sports podcasting —functions in a similar fashion. You subscribe to their hour-plus show that might come out multiple times a week, follow them on social media, watch them on cable, etc, all of which builds the parasocial relationship. Sure, most of the time the content is focused on sports, but sports and politics easily mix, from the anthem protests in 2016 to Trump attending the 2025 Superbowl or, just yesterday, giving an Air Force One interview to sports website OutKick on the way to the NCAA wrestling championships.

The proposition that sports commentators have underrated political significance is not novel. Matthew Walthier coined the term “Barstool Conservative” back in 2021 to describe the rising influence of sports commentators on right-wing politics. Walthier focused on Dave Portnoy, the founder of the Barstool Sports media platform, who had, during the 2020 presidential campaign season, conducted a softball interview with Donald Trump.

It was an unusual swerve into electoral politics for a guy whose politics previously had mostly consisted of unleashing his army of fans, his “stoolies,” on the social media accounts of folks who aroused his ire, especially any female employees or journalists who accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump seems to have returned the favor by offering Portnoy a middle management position in the Department of Commerce. Not bad for a guy who got his start with a Boston sports newszine featuring a bikini-clad woman-of-the-issue on the cover.)

Portnoy’s politics before his partisan turn is representative of something broader in sports bro culture. The ideology is fairly inchoate, a kind of vulgar libertarianism, a general desire to be allowed, personally, to do what they want free from restriction. In the case of the sports commentariat, that means things like legalizing sports gambling — which pays the bills for many of these platforms — adopting a live-and-let-live attitude towards culture war issues like abortion, and, most importantly, maintaining a visceral distaste for “cancel culture.”

I risk making this sound more coherent than it actually is. Think of it more as a pre-political possibility rather than a formal ideology. But there was a shift towards a more direct political engagement in the mid-2010s. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details here, but the rightward turn in the sports commentariat was a reaction to the progressive turn in the Democratic Party during the first Trump term and the Biden administration.

Vulgar libertarianism thus encountered its polar opposite, vulgar progressivism, which I’ll define as a crude desire to remove hate speech, misinformation, and the like from the public sphere by whatever means necessary. Criticize the spillover vandalism accompanying the post-George Floyd protests? You must be a racist and should be removed from public life. Criticize the mask mandate during the early stages of the covid pandemic? You must be peddling misinformation and the government should lean on social media platforms to shadowban your account.

Now, I write this as someone who is supportive of the George Floyd protests and who took pandemic restrictions seriously. But various hamfisted attempts to coerce conformity via public shaming and State power sparked a backlash, especially among sports bros.

Think about it in practical terms. You’re a white, schlubby guy (I write this as a white, schlubby guy myself) whose greatest passion in life is sports, likely centered around the city you were raised in, eg Boston or New York. In terms of politics, you live in a kind of obtuse, apolitical-seeming bubble. Now, yes, politics are pervasive in sports — if the US military spending millions on flyovers at games isn’t political, what is?? — but they are invisible to you because you’re blind to the ways familiar norms are just a reflection of the existing political and cultural consensus.

It’s a life of sporting torpitude. But then, rather suddenly, in a span of just a few years, you’re confronted with the cresting of one progressive social movement after another. You’re told that your favorite sports league is racist because the ownership is overwhelmingly white and the players are disproportionately black. You’re told that female professional athletes are underpaid and that means sports are misogynistic. You’re told that you’re homophobic if you raise questions about trans athletes in womens’ sports. Then, in rapid fire fashion, you aren’t allowed to attend the games because of pandemic shutdowns, you have to wear a mask and socially-distance once the stadiums open back up, and your favorite players are being yelled at for refusing to vaccinate.

This is not a defense of any of those reactions, but for just a moment put yourself in the shoes of these bros. You wouldn’t feel like you’re the one who turned political; no, it was those other people who got political! A bunch of progressive activists came out of the woodwork, said you were the problem, and then tried to make you do, say, and believe a bunch of stuff you don’t approve of. If you didn’t play along, you might be publicly shamed.

In that moment, just as you’re most frustrated by the attempts to drag you into enlightenment, guess who came to your defense, who told you that you were completely in the right and that it was actually those progressive scolds who were wrong and hypocritical? It was Donald Trump.

Trump and the Republicans leaned in while Democrats leaned out. Remember the discourse prior to the 2024 election? Any time a Democrat dared to go on a sports bro platform for an interview — like Joe Rogan’s podcast — they’d be met with widespread criticism for “giving a platform” to unsavory people with hateful views. That may have been a fair critique, but left-coded public figures leaving that space created a vacuum; and sports culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum, making it easy to fill with Republicans and reactionary politics.

In any case, Trump has appeared on fan platforms and at major sporting events throughout his campaigns and presidencies. He’s a ringside regular at UFC matches. He goes to the Daytona 500, the SuperBowl, the NCAA wrestling championship, you name it. (By contrast, Joe Biden avoided public appearances, including sporting events, although that was mostly a product of his team attempting to cover up his infirmity.)

Regardless, Trump’s outreach to the sports commentariat and their audiences paid dividends. I’d love to see more specific data testing the overlap, but we do know that undecided voters in the final days before the election — especially low information, male-skewing voters — broke heavily for Trump. The number one issue for these swing voters was related to inflation and the economy, but that doesn’t tell us what activated them, what got them up off their butts and to the polls. To the extent that campaigning matters, Trump campaigned in precisely the venues where sports bros congregate. The Democrats, largely, did not.

However, there are signs that Trump is now overplaying his hand with the sports bros. Recent actions by the administration are alienating them by pushing the same buttons as progressive Democrats once did. Sports fans are realizing that the Trump administration, despite claiming to stand for free speech and in opposition to cancel culture, is actually deeply censorious, anti-libertarian, and obsessive.

I want to repeat that would be a mistake to frame this primarily as a function of ideological malalignment. It’s something cruder and more personal than that. When Joe Rogan calls Donald Trump’s tariff war with Canada the “dumbest fucking feud,” he’s not doing so out of some principled belief in the economic value of free trade; no, it’s because he goes to Canadian sporting events and he knows Canadian players and celebrities. It’s offensive on a personal level rather than an ideological one.

And when Dave Portnoy moots his dissatisfaction with Elon Musk’s DOGE project, it’s not because he’s opposed to government cost-cutting; it’s because he’s an investor in Tesla and he’s upset with the falling stock price resulting from Musk’s inattentiveness.

But there are signs of a more general buyer’s regret emerging. The sports bros backed Trump only to find out that a group of shadow executives stand behind Trump’s less-than-optimally-hyperbolic throne. And they are attempting to impose their own radical agendas on the American public while Trump absentmindedly golfs and gripes. For example, Russell Vought at OMB, who is the architect of the administration’s implementation of Project 2025, is a Christian nationalist extremist who wants a near total ban on abortion and would like to ban pornography. Either of these policies would be anathema to much of sports bro culture, which doesn’t like being told what to do by the puritans of either party.

I’m reminded of something comedian Andrew Schulz said while explaining his own political arc. Schulz is not a sports commentator, but he’s a frequent guest on their shows and is part of the culturally adjacent comedy roast circuit. As he tells it, when he was a kid in the 90s, he felt himself being “pushed left” by the “censorious right” telling people not to swear or talk about sex. Today, however, “it’s the opposite” with Republicans telling “crazy jokes” and Democrats being “a little big more censorious.” That predisposed him to be friendlier with Trump than he might have been otherwise.

Now contrast that live-and-let-live attitude with what the Trump administration is actually doing. The latest scandal ruffling feathers in the sports world revolves around the Department of Defense removing the story of Jackie Robinson from its website. Donald Trump had signed an executive order purging DEI instruction from all federal agencies and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had declared a war on anyone “involved in any of the DEI woke shit.” And so some Trump administration flunky decided that praising Army veteran Jackie Robinson for smashing the color barrier in baseball was too woke and took it down.

Well, that sparked a massive backlash from sports commentators. They might notionally oppose DEI excesses — not that any of them know what the heck DEI really is — but they do know, admire, and value Jackie Robinson, a true sports icon. Perhaps they didn’t realize that the Trump administration is stacked with overt white nationalists who are using DEI as an excuse to try and resegregate the military and the government. Or, as a host on the Dan Le Batard Show put it, these are “dorks” and “nerds,” people “who want to be racist and not know [base]ball” at the same time.

Look, I have no way of quantifying the potential cumulative effect of such scandals between now and the 2026 midterms. But if you are the Trump administration and your goal is to maintain a congressional majority, then repeatedly alienating this key swing constituency is a remarkable self-own. It would be like Bill Clinton making fun of minivans in 1998 after relying on “soccer moms” for his victory in 1996, or George W. Bush pooh-poohing racing while wooing “NASCAR dads” in 2004.

Can Trump’s GOP avoid a blue wave in 2026? If it does, it should probably start by not pissing off the “UFC bros” and the sports commentators who delivered Trump the equivalent of a fifth-round victory in 2024.