Rogan’s audience has heard him make a lot of promises lately, and one of the newer ones is that he’s always been on the left. It’s a claim that doesn’t hold up well against his own back catalog, and it’s a claim that a fresh Media Matters review suggests doesn’t hold up against his recent shows either.
The watchdog group combed through transcripts of 33 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience posted to YouTube between July 1 and September 14, 2026. What they found wasn’t a host drifting toward progressive politics. It was a host repeating familiar claims about rigged elections, porous borders and a Democratic Party supposedly engineering its own permanent majority, claims researchers say lack supporting evidence and sometimes cross into conspiracy territory.
Five episodes in the sample contained what Media Matters classified as election misinformation. Those five pulled in more than 10.8 million YouTube views between them, averaging nearly 2.2 million views apiece. Six other episodes touched on elections and voting without tripping the misinformation flag, and those averaged roughly 1.3 million views.
Episodes that skipped election talk entirely landed close to 1.5 million views on average. Run the numbers and the episodes with misinformation outperformed the rest of the sample by more than 41%, a gap that undercuts any notion that this material is a drag on the show rather than part of its draw.
Media Matters pulled its view counts on October 10, 2026, using YouTube’s newer counting method, adopted August 24, 2026, which registers a view as soon as a video starts playing.
Guests told a similarly lopsided story. Across those 33 episodes, Rogan sat down with JD Vance, the sitting vice president; Steve Hilton, a Republican running for governor in California; and Rupert Lowe, head of the UK’s Restore Britain party which Media Matters describes as far right. Not a single Democrat or left-leaning politician made an appearance.
The Vance and Lowe episodes ranked among the three most-watched of the period, with Vance’s sit-down topping 3.7 million views and Lowe’s clearing 2.9 million. Both guests used their airtime to raise allegations about how Democrats run elections.
The content of Rogan’s own commentary reads like a greatest hits of claims that fact-checkers and voting rights groups have challenged for years. On why Democrats resist voter ID laws, he didn’t hedge: “there’s only one reason,” he said, because they “want to cheat.”
Pressed further on the subject, he went past suspicion into accusation. “I’m not skeptical, I’m accusing them. I think they stole the election, and I think it’s common,” he said.
He pointed to California as proof of concept. “You have to consider the fact that it’s really possible that the elections get stolen, and the California one was a big one for me,” he said, before circling back to a years-old grievance about the 2020 race.
“The real weird one for me was how many more votes Biden got in 2020 than any other president ever,” he said.
On the ID question specifically, he framed resistance to it as evidence of guilt. “I think they cheat, and I think they’ve been doing it forever, and I don’t think there’s any other reason why you would have no voter ID,” he said, adding, “Most Americans want voter ID except for operatives.”
Immigration got folded into the same narrative, with Rogan describing it less as a policy debate and more as a numbers scheme run by one party. “They wanted that border open. They wanted those people coming in. They wanted to flood the census. They wanted to flood those swing states,” he said.
He went further, framing new arrivals as a slow-motion voting bloc in the making. “They wanted to make those people voters, and they wanted to try to just make it like it’s California, like the whole country is California,” he said.
On how that would translate into political power, he brought up the census. “The census doesn’t count whether or not you’re a citizen, the census counts whether or not you’re a human being,” he said, then connected the dots to an electoral endgame. “And then you have guaranteed voters. … And then you would just completely take over the presidential elections. And I think they were trying to do that,” he said.
He also raised doubts about who’s actually casting ballots in his home state. “California doesn’t allow ID to vote. So, who knows how many people are, especially with mail-in ballots, how many people are voting that aren’t citizens? No one knows,” he said.
Media Matters pointed to Reuters reporting showing noncitizen voter registrations make up a tiny sliver of the rolls, too small to swing outcomes, and don’t automatically translate into ballots cast. The group also noted that researchers have linked rhetoric like this to the widely debunked Great Replacement theory, which holds that migration is being steered to shrink the white share of the population for political gain.
His guests echoed the same themes rather than pushing back on them. Vance made the case that ID requirements would settle the question outright. “If Democrats don’t want to cheat in the election, then just make everybody actually show an ID,” he said, “If Democrats really don’t think that there’s any cheating, give us voter ID.”
None of this means Rogan has gone quiet on Trump. Media Matters noted he’s voiced real frustration with the administration he endorsed in 2024, criticizing military action in Iran, the handling of immigration enforcement and the long-running fight over the Jeffrey Epstein files.
He’s taken specific aim at the Trump family’s finances, too, accusing the former president of making “billions in crypto” and suggesting his sons’ business ties deserve scrutiny. “Involved in these businesses, and like there’s a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people,” Rogan said.
That mix of genuine gripes about Trump’s conduct and continued promotion of Republican talking points on elections and immigration is exactly what fuels skepticism toward Rogan’s leftward rebrand. It’s the same skepticism MMA analyst Luke Thomas aired after a resurfaced clip showed Rogan brushing off Donald Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape.
In that 2024 conversation with former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, Rogan described Trump’s remarks about grabbing women without consent as nothing more than locker-room talk.
“Well that’s the same thing as like the grab ’em by the [ ] comment. Guys talk like that, it doesn’t mean they mean it. Guys talk like that all the time for fun. It’s not… you know you could say it’s misogynist, it’s this… it’s just [ ] talking. It’s what guys do and they know that the other person doesn’t mean it, that’s why it’s funny to say,” Rogan said.
Blagojevich didn’t just agree. He revealed that his own wife had confronted him over defending Trump while raising their daughters, and that he’d deflected by reminding her of his own crude comments.
He told her, “Before you judge somebody else, look at your own husband.” That remark referred back to Blagojevich’s own secretly recorded musings about appointing actress Halle Berry to Obama’s vacated Senate seat. Rogan laughed along as Blagojevich drew the comparison.
Thomas didn’t frame his criticism as a demand for ideological purity. “All of us will make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. All of us will change opinions. I’ve changed opinions… And so, for that reason, all of us deserve grace,” he said.
“That grace doesn’t extend to just kind of going out there and pantomiming vague left-wing ideas and then asserting that you’re leftwing,” Thomas said.
He argued the stakes go well beyond Rogan’s personal politics, pointing to the reach of his platform. “You endorsed the most incompetent right-wing movement possible, Joe. You laundered the reputation of the inner circle of all of those people. You have done extraordinary harm as an influence campaigner, so to speak, to make those ideas palatable, those ideas that are ruining the lives of ordinary people in this country and well beyond,” he said.
Thomas was careful to separate Rogan’s personal attitudes from the practical effect of his platform, arguing that the latter is what counts.
“You used considerable media and personal resources to help put back into power a guy who tried to take a presidential election. This is a fact. It was grossly incompetent in every possible way, and you said, ‘Let’s do that again, but only worse,'” he said.
