Joe Rogan Warned Against a Blue Texas and Kept His Distance as Democrats Swept Every Statewide Race

Rogan left Los Angeles in 2020 over lockdowns and homeless camps and gave Trump a three-hour interview 11 days before the 2024 election. In 2026 he kept his distance from the campaigns, and Democrats won every statewide race on the Texas ballot. The journey from there to here is a microcosm of our empire in decline.

In the summer of 2020 Joe Rogan moved his family and his podcast from Los Angeles to Austin, and he said plainly why. "The lockdown still exists," he told a guest before the move, and "the homelessness is completely out of control." California was broke, in his telling, because the people running it were incompetent, and he had no faith that more tax money would fix that. Years later he called the Los Angeles shutdown one of the easiest reasons to leave. He would be happy paying taxes, he said, "if you guys were doing a great job and if there wasn't tents on every street corner."

From Austin he booked guests who disputed federal vaccine guidance. In December 2021 he sat down with Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who said people who had already had COVID had no reason to get vaccinated and who warned of heart inflammation in vaccinated children. Weeks later came Robert Malone, a scientist who had worked on early mRNA research and who said on the show that he had received two doses of the Moderna shot. He argued for "freedom of choice particularly for their children" and urged parents to "think twice" before giving the shots to their kids.

The backlash arrived in January 2022. A letter from 270 doctors, scientists, professors and health workers urged Spotify, which held exclusive rights to the show, to adopt a misinformation policy and singled out the Malone episode. Neil Young demanded that the company choose between him and Rogan, and Spotify removed his music. The company announced advisories for podcast episodes about COVID, and Rogan posted a video defending his guests as "highly credentialed" while promising to "try harder" to book people with differing views. Spotify kept the show.

On Oct. 25, 2024, Rogan released a three-hour conversation with Donald Trump that drew more than 40 million views on YouTube before Election Day, by published counts. The night before the vote he wrote on X, "For the record, yes, that's an endorsement of Trump." Eleven days after the election, at UFC 309 in Madison Square Garden, the president-elect hurried over to embrace him at cageside. In April 2025 Rogan sat next to the president at UFC 314 in Miami, and in June 2026 he worked the broadcast of the UFC card staged at the White House.

All of that made Rogan a political figure, and critics treated him as one. After 2024, commentators counted him among the podcast "manosphere" credited with helping Trump win.

His 2026 record reads like that of a man backing away from Trump. In January he asked of immigration enforcement, "Are we really going to be the Gestapo?" In April he called himself "politically homeless." In September he said of James Talarico, the Democrat he had urged in 2025 to run for president, "I did like him." In October he told Michael Douglas that some of what Trump stood for "turned out to not be real," and he named the promise of no wars. "I do not like this Iran war in any way, shape or form," he said. Trump had not returned to the show as of late October, by published accounts, and no Rogan endorsement in any 2026 race appears on the record.

On Nov. 3, Gov. Greg Abbott lost to Gina Hinojosa by roughly 706,000 votes, and Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate. The secretary of state's unofficial returns show Democrats sweeping the statewide ballot, from lieutenant governor down to the railroad commission and the state Supreme Court, and winning the Texas House 83 seats to 67. The state is short of entirely blue. Republicans keep 19 of 31 seats in the state Senate, a check on the new majority, as South Shore Press detailed on Nov. 12, when Democrats had already filed gun bills for the session that opens in January.

Rogan had warned against this outcome. In July he said, "The liberals that want to turn Texas blue, like, don't. You're going to ruin it." In August he predicted that the THC crackdown would "turn the whole thing blue," and after the vote he said the ban had "probably cost them the election." In the same episode he added, "I don't like politics at all."

Perhaps no podcaster could have closed a margin of 700,000 votes. Still, the man who moved halfway across the country to escape California's politics called himself politically homeless in the year that decided Texas. The state where his family lives and his business is based will now have a Democratic governor and a Democratic House majority, the same party that governs the California he left.