Fox News has been on a ratings roll since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Salem Radio Network host Mike Gallagher says he’s felt the excitement from his conservative radio audience in that same timeframe.
Obviously, it isn’t the first time in his longtime news/talk radio career that Mike Gallagher has helmed his show while a Republican is in the Oval Office.
But he said he’s never seen the excitement from his audience like he’s seeing right now.
“I think I could change my name from ‘The Happy Warrior’ to ‘The Ecstatic Warrior,'” said Gallagher. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been this just delighted with our daily content. Everything has changed since November 5th. Everything. It’s one of the most dramatic reversals of an audience mood that I’ve ever experienced in decades of doing this. People are optimistic. People are enthusiastic.
“I, of course, use a lot of barometers to see how the show is doing. One of the most important ones for me are our direct-response advertisers. Usually, that’s captured in our various donor campaigns that we do where people can help Food for the Poor or Prison Fellowship Ministry. Everything is up. Everything is up dramatically … I go to work every day practically giddy with knowing that I’ve got a much happier audience now that the election turned out the way, at least our audience, wanted it to turn out.”
Gallagher admitted that he considered what retirement could look like if Trump hadn’t won the election.
“It would’ve been just so difficult to keep an audience engaged, positive, and focused if everything that we worked so hard to achieve came crashing down,” he shared. “I was truly worried it would’ve impacted our business mightily … I’m not sure that even today most people are fully aware of how consequential this outcome was of this election, but it was it was huge, not only for the country but also for the industry that I’ve worked in for all these years.”
In all of his years in the news/talk radio world, Mike Gallagher said there’s only been one other event as unifying to his audience as Trump’s return: the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“We all became short of unified and we changed our whole way of looking at the world. There was a different world view. I really treasured that sense of unity that we had. In fact, I lived and worked in New York City and for weeks and weeks after the terror attack, people didn’t even honk their horn at each other,” said Gallagher. “Everybody got along. There wasn’t the typical bickering, fighting on the subway in the morning. You could sense it in the audience. Something profoundly different happened to our audience — and to the country, obviously — after 9/11.
It was the same with this. I mean, it was just in the opposite direction. Our audience went from kind of a sense of dread and almost fear and loathing to how his could turn out to just euphoria, just relief and gratitude that the election turned out the way it did. That’s the only other time that I remember the audience collectively changing like that was after 9/11.”
The Mike Gallager Show host added that the change in attitude doesn’t require him to do anything different to his Salem Radio Network audience.
“I’ve just gotta be authentic and I’ve gotta express sort of what they’re expressing. I always like to think that ‘I say out loud what the audience is thinking.’ Hopefully at this stage of the game, if you’re at a point in your career where you have enough credibility and equity they trust you. They trust us to to be our authentic selves and to speak from the heart and talk from the gut.”
Gallagher concluded that his biggest challenge right now is to keep up with everything his audience wants to hear about.
“I’ve only got a few hours a day on air. With commercial brakes and all that, you’re talking about 30 minutes of content an hour,” he said. “Realistically, it’s hard to get it all in. My whole mantra is ‘breaking news and what to make of it all’ and there’s so much breaking news that I have a hard time squeezing 10 pounds of sugar into a three-pound sack.
“We’re also facing some technical challenges now that we have Salem News Channel, which is the over-the-top streaming component. It can’t be you can’t plug an Access into the wall anymore and do the show in your bathrobe. You got lights and cameras and everything else … We have a whole bunch of challenges, but it’s just a pleasure to go to work these days. It’s such a joy and such a different atmosphere. I can’t wait every day, I just have a show that I want to get off my chest because there’s so much to absorb and it’s a great time to be alive and it’s a great time to be a talk show host, that’s for sure.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
