According to Spotify, Alex Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy is the second-most-listened-to podcast in the world, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience and with a very different audience. While the audience for Rogan’s health advice and anti-woke politics skews heavily male, Cooper’s podcast of girls’ room secrets, dating stories and therapy-like disclosures is listened to by young, sex-positive women. Cooper, who turned 30 this year, invites guests such as Katy Perry, Heidi Klum and Miley Cyrus to dress down (most appear on the podcast clad in sweatsuits and baseball caps) and share intimate details of their sexual and psychological lives.
Cooper’s honesty is wildly popular and profitable; in 2021, she inked a $60m deal with Spotify, one of the biggest ever for a podcast at the time. In August, she signed a new deal worth more than double that, leaving Spotify for a $125m three-year offer from the US radio company SiriusXM.
The big money hasn’t dulled the sexual content. A recent sampling of episode titles reads like 1970s Cosmopolitan cover lines: Narcissists, Blow Jobs, and Red Flags; Getting Older, Hotter, and Wiser; and I Made Out with My Boyfriend’s Mistress.
So regular listeners may have been to surprised to hear Kamala Harris sit down opposite Cooper on the podcast this week, not least because Cooper herself had promised not to sully her sex-positive show with staged political appearances.
In February, she told the New York Times she had shut down conversations with the White House. “Go on CNN, go on Fox,” she said at the time. “You want to talk about your sex life, Joe [Biden]?”
Weeks before the election, Cooper has had a change of heart. “At the end of the day, I couldn’t see a world in which one of the main conversations in this election is women, and I’m not a part of it,” she explained on air, reflecting how central she sees herself to female pop culture in the US.
For Harris, the decision to go on such an explicit podcast might seem risque, but politically it makes perfect sense. Not only does Call Her Daddy have huge reach among young women, but because Cooper has kept politics away from her public image, experts suspect that her audience might be a well of untapped, undecided voters, too.
“Everyone I know has at least tuned into a Call Her Daddy episode,” said Jessica Siles, the deputy press secretary of the gen Z-led non-profit Voters of Tomorrow. “It’s not a news show; it’s a lifestyle podcast, and those are the exact sort of people who need Harris’s message more than others. She’s reaching an audience that she hasn’t met before, who might align with her on some of the issues, but need a little bit of a push to turn out.”
The show had a different tone from previous episodes. Harris didn’t get any questions about sex positions or bachelorette parties. Instead the conversation mainly focused on reproductive health, women’s rights and the vice-president’s family life.
Though Cooper switched out her trademark sweatpants for what can best be described as gen Z business casual (black stiletto boots, black wide leg jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt branded with “Unwell”, the name of her media company), the interview still read as comfy, with Harris fielding mostly safe questions.
The standout moment came when Harris shot back at Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ recent comments about Harris’s lack of biological children. (The Arkansas governor said: “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”) “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble. Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life.”
But it wasn’t all stump speech. Harris chatted about being friends with Kerstin Emhoff, her husband Doug’s ex-wife and mother to Harris’s stepchildren, Ella and Cole: “Family comes in many forms … This is not the 1950s any more.”
Cooper opened the episode with a disclaimer, suggesting her interview was not necessarily an endorsement of Harris: “I am so aware I have a very mixed audience when it comes to politics,” she said. “So please hear me when I say my goal today is not to change your political affiliation.”
But Cooper does come with political baggage. A former ad sales representative, she started Call Her Daddy with her roommate, Sofia Franklyn, in 2018, as a forum for what they dubbed “female locker room talk”. The podcast was quickly picked up by Barstool Sports, a media company known for its blog covering sports, pop culture and viral moments. Barstool’s owner, Dave Portnoy, is an archetypical frat boy with a history of making misogynistic and racist remarks. The journalist Matthew Walther coined the term “Barstool conservatism” to describe the political leanings of the young men who read Barstool and hold libertarian, but socially conservative, views.
When faced with accusations of misogyny and toxic workplace practices, Portnoy held up Call Her Daddy as a marquee name and proof the company wasn’t only appealing to young misogynist men. “I gave two girls their own radio show. We have hired girl after girl – they say it’s a great place to work,” he said at the time.
But that love didn’t last: in the summer of 2020, Call Her Daddy went dark. After weeks of silence, Portnoy said the hosts and Barstool were involved in a contract dispute, with Cooper agreeing to go on with Barstool but Franklyn unwilling to agree to the terms. He called the hosts “unprofessional, disloyal, and greedy” and said Barstool lost $100,000 with every missed episode.
This fracture ultimately caused a split between the hosts, and Cooper continued without Franklyn. Cooper parted with Barstool a year later, when the Spotify deal came through.
Messiness aside, Cooper’s initial association with Portnoy might explain why, even if she has socially liberal values, she remains associated with a type of fratty, more conservative listener – the kinds of girls who might date guys who read Barstool and maybe even vote for Donald Trump.
Jeri Steinmetz and Ciara Parsons are cousins who host a rival comedic conversation podcast, Ladies & Tangents. (Tagline: “Think sleepover but we all have mental health disorders.”) The pair say many lifestyle podcasters start out non-partisan to avoid controversy, but it’s tough to stay that way in a hyper-political world.
“We’re women, mothers, and these issues directly affect us and our fans. So we did start speaking out, and I think that’s what happened here with Call Her Daddy,” Steinmetz said.
Cooper, who declined a request for comment, seemed to expect backlash to the episode, and got it from all sides. Some listeners wished she would stay out of politics. Others wanted her to be tougher on Harris. Some questioned the optics of Harris doing the interview so soon after the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
“So cool! Kamala sits down for a podcast as a fourth of the country is underwater,” one Instagram user wrote in a comment on the podcast’s page. “She can’t hold a press conference but can go on podcasts lol,” said another.
Newsweek reported that the show and Cooper herself lost “thousands” of Instagram followers after the episode dropped.
But Cooper’s reach remains phenomenal as traditional news outlets hemorrhage audiences, and she’s become an avatar for a generation that’s more likely to learn about headlines through a TikTok or Instagram reel. Variety reported that musicians who appear on her show see a boost on music streaming apps – even ones who are celebrities on their own, such as John Mayer (who saw streams jump by 350%) and John Legend (200%). Vogue gave lavish coverage to Cooper’s “intimate beachside wedding” to the producer Matt Kaplan, which took place on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.
Though Call Her Daddy has matured in recent years, becoming as much about mental health as it is about masturbation, it’s been tough for Cooper to shake her reputation of, as the New York Times put it, “an evangelist of feminine raunch”. She’s become so synonymous with the world of women’s media that Netflix’s new romantic comedy series Nobody Wants This name-drops her as a rival to its main character, a blonde sex-podcast host played by Kristen Bell.
Harris is not the first candidate to use a buzzy entertainment show to try to reach younger voters. Barack Obama wooed millennials by appearing on Zach Galifianakis’s YouTube show and Bill Clinton played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show.
But Rebeca Damico, a 21-year-old public relations specialist and avid Call Her Daddy Fan from Salt Lake City, says this was a more revealing encounter. She felt she learned more about Harris through this interview than in last month’s presidential debate.
“I watched the debate, and it was way more comical than informational,” she said. “Call Her Daddy did a good job at humanizing Harris, and it was cool to see her not even as a politician, but as a woman.”
In the spirit of fairness, Cooper said she had invited Trump on the show to counter Harris’s points. He has yet to respond. “That would be such a fascinating episode,” said Siles, the Voters of Tomorrow press secretary. “To be honest, I’m not sure I believe Donald Trump knows what a pap smear is. So to go on a show about women’s issues would be entertaining, at least.”
