Dan Le Batard still doesn’t really want to talk about politics.
“Almost all of politics is deeply corrosive and corrupt to me, on both sides,” Le Batard told Awful Announcing ahead of a live interview one week from Election Day with Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
The interview is part of the Kamala Harris campaign’s continued outreach to unengaged voters (especially men) through sports hosts like Matt Barnes, Shannon Sharpe, Rich Eisen — and now Le Batard.
But Meadowlark Media co-founder doesn’t see himself as a mouthpiece for Democratic party talking points, nor an advocate for liberal views.
“I’m not particularly for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. I am just very deeply against all of that that is happening on the other side,” Le Batard says. “I really am at a loss for how it is that we’ve arrived in the felonious behavior of Donald Trump and a resume filled with just unspeakable, awful, and immoral. I can’t be about that.”
The 2024 election is a culmination of Le Batard’s gradual embrace of politics in the Trump era, a journey that looped through the offices of Jimmy Pitaro at ESPN and back through to Miami, where the 55-year-old was born and raised by Cuban refugees in a diverse community he sees as always being 20 years ahead of the rest of the country.
Five years after watching Trump win with a mix of curiosity, confusion, and guilt, Le Batard left the restrictive airways of ESPN for editorial freedom. At Meadowlark Media, he sets a mandate that “microphones matter” as the face and cofounder of the openly progressive production house. From the jump, the relaunched The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz has made political commentary core to its mission.
All with that one specific opponent in mind.
“This is very much a response to what Trump has wrought,” he says.
That doesn’t mean Le Batard is doomed with “Trump derangement syndrome,” as the right wing loves to label left-leaning pundits. Throughout his initial years running Meadowlark, the company co-founder has tried to focus on issues of equality and justice above all.
Whether through recorded essays on gun violence or a recurring segment on climate change, Le Batard has worked to integrate the real stuff into the “playpen” of sports. Like everything he covers, he mixes going low with going high. When he reads climate facts, his producers poke him with a facetiously cheery song called “We’re All Gonna Die.” It’s fair game for cohost Jon “Stugotz” Weiner to interrupt the host while he murmurs about the latest Trump rally or the next corrupt Florida politician.
This year, Le Batard hosted a nonpartisan voter registration drive in the lead-up to the general election. The livestream, which featured guests like Steve Kerr and Keegan Michael-Key, drove more than 18,000 voter actions (checking registration status and local voting info) and nearly 1,000 direct registrations.
Le Batard has also developed a go-to stable of segments to make the serious stuff easier for the audience to swallow. When a hard-hitting reporter like Michael Schmidt of The New York Times or controversial pundit like Twitch streamer Hasan Piker joins the show, the audience knows to expect diversions and gags. He’s always cooked up some vegetables to go with the dessert, but he’s testing his limits now.
They say the enemy of an enemy is a friend. So with the Walz interview looming and the election finish line near, I ask Le Batard about his approach. A journalist and cautious pundit, he is seen as aligned with Walz — at least when it comes to beating Trump. But what does it look like to hold Walz accountable as a public official from his sideline?
“You don’t want to be so soft that you compromise your integrity, and you don’t want to be so hard that you fail to open up an interview subject,” Le Batard says. “It’s a balancing act, for sure. It’s a bit of a highwire.”
Still, it’s an opportunity no host would turn down. No different than Sharpe or Joe Rogan, Le Batard is hyping up the interview. He just hopes his audience is along for the ride.
The Dan Le Batard Show is one of the few daily shows that matters in 2024. It routinely ranks in the top 10 on the audio charts and boasts more than 200,000 YouTube subscribers along with licensing deals with DraftKings, NBC Sports, and Warner Bros. Discovery.
A source close to Meadowlark tells me the show counts battleground states Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina among its top 10 audience markets. That all means the Miami native is one of the few hosts whose voice cuts through.
The host has converted that goodwill into what he believes is right, even if that means losing some audience. He believes that what he says about the state of the country — or what he can get a guest like Walz or Beto O’Rourke to say — carries weight for his sizable and loyal listeners.
“I feel like our audience loyalty is such that they trust they know me and us better than their average entertainment and information sources,” Le Batard says. “I know that is the cost every time that I address some of this stuff, that it would be safer not to address it. Safer to skip past whistling, as if you don’t notice what the compromises are on your integrity and your principles.”
Le Batard tells me he has not seen data proving people tune out over his political commentary. Yet the Trump era is littered with sports hosts who wandered into politics and lost credibility, popularity, or both. Having a strong opinion doesn’t always mean people want to hear it.
He remains confident despite that risk. He also believes that even if he turns some people off, others will find the show in part because they appreciate his views on the world.
That doesn’t mean Le Batard, who knows he can be “sanctimonious,” is the only one talking. As with sports, he picks his spots and lets experts fill in the gaps. Beyond friends like Jemele Hill or Adam McKay, the show brings on recurring faces like The Bulwark’s Tim Miller to drill down on the news and narratives of the day.
It’s working. This spring, Meadowlark worked with The American Experiment Project to measure its impact. The group tested 1,800 random voters with clips from The Dan Le Batard Show about the election. It found that they were more influential on voters than clips from competitors like Bill Simmons or Stephen A. Smith. An interview with Miller in March about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 was found to move 2.1 percent of the test’s subjects from Trump voters to Democratic party voters. It was one of AEP’s most persuasive test videos ever.
“This man sat in the White House, eating pizza, and watching cable news while the capital was stormed by people waving his flag, attacking police officers, and trying to end our democracy.” @Timodc shares the most shocking fact that people are looking over as Donald Trump is… pic.twitter.com/uwpktXpiXM
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) March 6, 2024
That type of material influence keeps his show and Meadowlark going. The numbers don’t lie, but the goal isn’t simply swaying electoral politics. Le Batard almost sees himself as a single-issue pundit, focused on equality above all. That belief system gives him a delicate rhetorical weapon that he takes seriously. If morality becomes cheerleading, people tune out.
“I’ve not gone further left on clamoring for equality,”he says.
He believes he is playing a long game.
“I do realize that much of the objection to me is by people who are saying that they want the power structure to stay as it is,” Le Batard says. “All I’m doing is looking at what it is that’s been happening since 2016 and not being cool with stuff that I will be on the right side of history on. I’m not taking an extreme position. I’m objecting to people who are taking extreme positions.”
Today’s polarized political environment insists upon a domino effect of beliefs. If a prominent voice argues in favor of a liberal position on something like gun violence, most assume they also align with Democrats on abortion or foreign policy. Sports hosts not ready to handle the heat of having views affixed to or projected onto them dance in the middle. They give voice to talking points and shy away from debate.
Nobody would mistake Le Batard for a political expert, but he isn’t running away from the responsibility of being that kind of commentator.
In the thick of election season, the host is thinking back to a lesser-known clash with ESPN. Before the last election, Le Batard tried to moderate a panel where Biden would interact with Cuban voters in Miami. ESPN would not allow him to participate. No matter that the panel was journalistic in nature, in his backyard, and an event where he would engage with his people directly and shine a light on them to the rest of the country.
This time around, Le Batard is doing just that — on his terms.
The push against inequalities and the changing of hearts and minds that he hopes to pull off is incremental. It’s slow. And it won’t end this November, he says.
No matter who wins, says Le Batard, “I’m gonna be no less confused about what’s happened in our country over the last eight years, and I’m not going to feel all that much better about where it is that our divisions are, especially if the polling is any kind of accurate on this being some kind of close.”
