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Russell Brand, the British comedian and actor turned streamer, was sentenced Monday in London to 10 years and six months in prison for one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, charges he had denied.
Brand is among the latest high-profile figures associated with the online "manoverse" to face criminal proceedings. Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, influencers who built massive followings among young men, have been held in Miami since July as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom, where prosecutors have authorized 59 charges against them, including rape and human trafficking.
Brand and the Tate brothers became popular figures within parts of the pro-Trump online ecosystem, and Brand broadcast his show from the 2024 Republican National Convention. Two years later, their legal cases unfolded against a backdrop of sharply increased support for Democratic candidates among young men in last week's midterms.
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Voters under 30 backed Democratic House candidates by 73 percent to 25 percent, according to the Voter Poll by SSRS, a national election survey conducted for ABC, The Associated Press, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW and NBC. Two years earlier, they favored Democrats by 14 points in the national House exit poll. Young men, whom Trump targeted through appearances with Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Andrew Schulz during the 2024 campaign, posted some of the largest shifts toward Democrats.
"We lost all the podcast bros," David Sacks, the venture capitalist and former White House AI and crypto czar, said on the All-In podcast over the weekend, naming Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Von and Megyn Kelly. "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Republican strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek that Democrats have an opportunity to retain the young Latino men who first entered politics through Trump.
"They've got to develop a working-class agenda and a blue-collar economy," he said.
What the Exit Polls Show
The Voter Poll interviewed more than 100,000 voters in person, online and by phone between October 19 and November 3, for a national sample of about 80,000. Voters ages 18 to 24 backed Democrats by 77 percent to 21 percent, a 56-point margin that exceeded the 34-point advantage Barack Obama achieved among the same age group in the 2008 presidential election. Voters under 30 accounted for about 11 percent of the electorate this time, compared with 18 percent in 2008.
Democratic House candidates won 66 percent of men ages 18 to 29 and 78 percent of women in the same age group. Among white voters under 30, Democrats led 65 percent to 33 percent.
Latino voters also showed strong support for Democrats. Latino men nationally backed Trump by 54 percent to 44 percent in 2024, according to NBC News' exit poll. In this year's midterms, Latino men overall backed Democratic House candidates by 58 percent, while those under 45 supported Democrats by 64 percent to 32 percent. Latino voters under 30 favored Democrats by 79 percent to 18 percent, according to the Voter Poll.
Democrats also won House races in areas with substantial Latino populations, including the Rio Grande Valley and Paterson, New Jersey.
Asked about the issues, a plurality of 18- to 29-year-olds, 43 percent, put the economy first, according to NPR's analysis of the Voter Poll. More than eight in 10 said Trump's policies had made conditions worse, and similar shares opposed his tariffs and the war with Iran.
NPR suggested that lower turnout among Republican-leaning young voters may have contributed to the result. The October Harvard Youth Poll found that half of young Democrats said they would definitely vote, compared with a third of young Republicans.
John Della Volpe, who directs that poll, told USA Today in October that backing Trump in 2024 did not mean young men were "signing up to be Republicans for life."
The Hosts Went Quiet
Several podcasters who gave Trump extensive airtime during his 2024 campaign devoted less attention to him in 2026, according to media analyses.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of audio from 147 political podcasts found that mentions of Trump on conservative shows fell from about 39 per hour around the 2024 election to roughly 11 per hour by September 20. Monthly mentions dropped about 30 percent after the U.S. war with Iran began in late February. On left-leaning shows, mentions held steady.
Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog, reviewed 596 episodes published between January 1 and October 7 by nine shows that hosted Trump or Vice President JD Vance in 2024, including Rogan's, Von's and Schulz's Flagrant. Trump did not appear on any of them this year, and Vance appeared once, on Rogan's show. Only 27 episodes featured Trump allies as guests, and 20 of those came from Rogan and Patrick Bet-David's PBD Podcast. References to Trump fell from about 35 per episode in the first week of the year to fewer than five by early October.
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After the election, Rogan said on his show that Republicans got "destroyed," pointing to the Iran war as a reason, Forbes reported. Livestreamer Adin Ross, who hosted Trump in 2024, told his audience Democrats deserved to win. Von and Schulz, both of whom have criticized the administration over the war and immigration enforcement, had not addressed the results on their shows as of the weekend.
The break predates the vote. Rogan, who endorsed Trump the day before the 2024 election, has since criticized the administration’s handling of the Epstein files, its immigration tactics and the Iran war, which he has called a betrayal. Comedian Tim Dillon, who interviewed Vance a week before that election, said in May the war was the biggest betrayal of a political movement he had ever seen. Even Vance has admitted the White House “screwed up” its communications on the Epstein files.
Alex Bruesewitz, the 29-year-old Trump adviser widely credited with booking the 2024 podcast tour, told Vanity Fair the hosts were never really "team Trump" and that he had warned campaigns against pitching their candidates. "Republican candidates were really lame," he said.
Favorability Slipped as Rankings Held
Polling from Speaking With American Men, a Democratic project, found Rogan's favorable rating among young men fell 11 points, while Elon Musk dropped 14 points and Carlson 12, Puck reported in October. Cygnal's 2026 Young American Men Survey found that among men ages 18 to 30, Trump, Vance and the Republican Party were all viewed unfavorably.
Marquette Law School's national polling showed Trump's approval among young voters falling from 40 percent in January 2025 to 19 percent in April 2026, before recovering to 28 percent in June.
Von's This Past Weekend climbed one spot inside Edison's top 10 in the third quarter. Rogan renewed his Spotify deal in October with more than 18 million followers on Spotify and more than 21 million on YouTube.
Listeners stayed as the conversation drifted away from Trump and the Republican Party. In October, Rogan gave much of his airtime to criticism of the Iran war, surveillance cameras and ICE deployments in American cities, according to a transcript review by the Young Men Research Project, which tracked nine shows popular with young men.
The group's researchers argued that the hosts' disillusionment with Trump reflected a broader shift in attitudes among young male listeners, consistent with the movement toward Democrats recorded in polling and the midterm results.
How Much Did Podcasts Matter?
Researchers are still split on how much the so-called manosphere moved votes in the first place. A September working paper from New York University's Center for Social Media, AI and Politics reviewed 36,659 podcast episodes from 2024 alongside two survey datasets and found podcasts explained only a small part of the widening gender gap among young voters.
Still, Marquette found in June that 54 percent of adults who got political news from podcasts approved of Trump, compared with 38 percent of all adults. A Morning Consult survey published October 16 found nearly two-thirds of Gen Z adults get news from creators.
Democrats have been booking the shows too. Texas Senator-elect James Talarico's July 2025 appearance on Rogan was among the most notable political interviews on the show in two years, and Rogan urged him to run for president, Vanity Fair reported. Von hosted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on October 1, and Pete Buttigieg sat for two hours with Patrick Bet-David days before the vote.
The Young Men Research Project cautioned that the hosts remain wary of Democrats. Rogan, in an October episode, still complained about Biden-era border policy and floated that Democrats might open the borders again if they win in 2028.
Bruesewitz said he now considers himself more of a Trump voter than a Republican and warned that voters like him could sit out future elections if the party nominated someone in the mold of Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Samantha Beech and Rhian Morgan.
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