Hillary Clinton joins Kara Swisher at Vox Media for a midterms podcast, and she is paid in ad revenue
Hillary Rodham Clinton has a podcast again. High Stakes, a limited series she co-hosts with Kara Swisher, launched on Wednesday 14 October as a third weekly episode of On with Kara Swisher, the New York magazine show distributed by the Vox Media Podcast Network. It will run through the 3 November midterm elections and, the company says, beyond them.
On its face this is a celebrity booking. The detail that matters sits in the deal terms. According to Variety, Clinton is not taking a fee but a split of the advertising revenue the episodes generate, alongside Swisher. That makes a former secretary of state and presidential candidate a revenue-share partner of a podcast network, three weeks before an election, in the month political ad money has started to reach podcasting.
What has been confirmed
Vox Media announced the series on Tuesday 13 October. The first episode, titled High Stakes with HRC: The Affordability Episode, appeared in the On with Kara Swisher feed on 14 October and runs 56 minutes, according to its Apple Podcasts listing. The company says the two hosts will take on the cost of living, healthcare and technology while tracking the races for control of Congress, and will bring in guests from opposing sides to argue and to look for common ground.
The series sits inside Swisher’s existing feed rather than as a standalone show, so there is no separate High Stakes feed to subscribe to. On with Kara Swisher normally publishes twice a week. High Stakes becomes a third episode, on Wednesdays, for the run of the series. Vox Media said future collaborations between Clinton, Swisher and the company are to come, without saying what they are.
This is not Clinton’s first podcast. You and Me Both with Hillary Clinton launched at iHeartMedia in September 2020 as an interview show and ran, with gaps, into 2024. She also guest-hosted Pivot, Swisher’s other podcast with Scott Galloway, in August 2026, which The Hollywood Reporter describes as the pairing’s trial run.
What the companies have said
Clinton said in the statement Vox Media distributed: “I don’t think the stakes for our country and the world have ever been higher than they are in November. People are hungry for real conversation about what’s happening in our democracy and what it will mean for their families, and I can’t think of a better partner for that than Kara. There will be some discussion, some debate and hopefully a lot of laughter.”
Swisher pitched it as a variation on her other show: “Think of this series as Pivot, but with an actual expert as my co-host.” Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s co-founder and chief executive, called Clinton a hero to millions and said he was proud to bring her to Vox Media “as she embarks on this next chapter of her media career.” That phrase is worth holding on to. Our reading is that Vox Media is describing a talent signing with a long tail, not a six-week election special, even though the series itself is labelled limited.
Why a revenue share changes the mechanics
Big-name podcast deals have mostly been built on guarantees. Spotify’s renewal of Joe Rogan this month, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, pairs an upfront guarantee with a share of ad revenue. A pure revenue split moves the risk to the host: if the audience does not show up, the check is small. For the network the appeal is obvious. Vox Media adds one of the most recognisable names in American politics to a feed it already sells, pays only out of money that actually arrives, and does it without building a new show, a new feed or a new sales pitch.
The timing follows the money. Audioboom’s third-quarter trading update, published on 14 October, says its Showcase ad marketplace benefited in September from “the first meaningful wave of political advertising spend ahead of the US midterm elections”, in the words of chief executive Stuart Last. Triton Digital’s Q2 2026 US Podcast Ranker, published on 20 August, found news reach had risen to 25.7 percent, up 8.4 percent on the previous quarter and the sharpest category gain in its survey-based top 50, with campaigns increasing spend to reach voters. A Clinton-fronted show launching into that window is, in our view, designed to capture the spend at least as much as the audience.
Vox Media is also a different company from a year ago. James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems bought the Vox Media Podcast Network, together with Vox.com and New York magazine, in a deal completed in July that Variety puts at more than $300m. Since then the network has taken on sales and distribution for Guy Raz’s How I Built This rather than commissioning from scratch, and the Clinton deal fits the same pattern: attach the network to talent that already brings an audience, and share the proceeds.
What listeners are being offered, and whether they want it
Sounds Profitable published its Politics and Podcasting special report on the same day the first episode went out. It draws on The Podcast Landscape 2026, a survey of 5,473 US adults fielded in August. Among people who listen to podcasts weekly, 74 percent say it is appropriate for politicians to appear on them. Among people who never listen, only 36 percent agree. That gap widened from 29 to 38 points in a year, which suggests the podcast audience is becoming more comfortable with political guests just as the rest of the country becomes less so.
The same report finds that 18 percent of likely midterm voters say a podcast appearance would make them more likely to vote for a candidate, against 8 percent who say less likely. Republicans at 21 percent and Democrats at 19 percent are close; independents sit at 11 percent. The audience for political talk is split almost evenly, at 36 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans and 21 percent independents. The likely consequence for High Stakes is that it will be heard mostly by people who already agree with its host, and the promise of guests from opposing sides is the attempt to reach past them.
The harder number is the size of the category. Political talk reached 27 percent of monthly podcast consumers in 2026, down from 31 percent in 2025, and slipped from the second most consumed genre to fifth, behind comedy, true crime, sports and news. Vox Media is launching into a category that more listeners are leaving than joining, at the point in the cycle when the remaining audience is most engaged. It is not alone in that bet. Crooked Media relaunched the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast as Still Counting in September with the same eight-week runway to election day.
What happens to Swisher, and to the slot after November
Swisher’s own position shapes the deal. The Hollywood Reporter notes that she has said she will leave CNN now that Paramount Skydance has completed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, and that her CNN contract comes up for renewal later this year. The likely effect is that Vox Media becomes her main home, and High Stakes is the first thing built for that relationship rather than the last.
What nobody has confirmed yet is what the series becomes after 3 November. The options are a standalone Clinton show, a continuing Wednesday episode, or occasional specials, and the statements leave room for all three. A revenue-share deal makes continuation cheap for the network to offer, because it costs nothing if the audience fades. That points to a decision made on the November numbers, not in advance.
For listeners the practical change is small: one extra episode a week in a feed many already follow, free, with ads, through the election and probably past it. For anyone choosing between the best political podcasts this autumn, the test is whether a famous co-host adds reporting and argument the field lacks, or simply a name. For the industry, the datapoint is that the midterm cycle is paying political talent in revenue shares, and that a former presidential candidate was willing to take one. If the ad money matches the name, expect the same terms to be offered to more politicians in 2028.
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