When Clay Travis and Buck Sexton took over Rush Limbaugh’s radio slot in 2021 following Limbaugh’s death, it was hard to imagine that anyone could fill the conservative firebrand’s shoes.
Five years later, “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” is the country’s number one talk radio show in its time slot, between 12 to 3 p.m. ET, according to its syndicator Premiere Networks. It reaches 550 stations and about seven million monthly listeners.
The hosts’ self-described “buddy-cop movie” energy—three hours a day, five days a week, they banter about news and politics, sports and entertainment—has helped them build a network of eight podcasts, all focused on what they see as a more moderate style of conservatism.
They have fans in Congress and the White House, where two of their former employees now work, and have also become a popular stop on the conservative publicity tour, especially for book authors.
As old-fashioned radio hosts, they are not always seen as key players in the podcast “manosphere,” even though the program is consistently in the top charts as much as Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro, according to iHeart media metrics.
They are conversant in the culture wars: In an August segment about Abdul El-Sayed winning the Michigan Senate primary after campaigning with online commentator Hasan Piker, Sexton remarked that the Democratic Party was “making plenty of room for the ultraprogressive commie maniacs.”
To goad the WNBA, which was engulfed by controversy this season over the issue of transgender athletes, Travis recently dared reigning WNBA champions Las Vegas Aces to play a high-school boys’ team that had won a state championship, offering $10 million to the winners. The Aces haven’t responded publicly to his challenge.
But the hosts are just as likely to be discussing old-school and long-standing conservative obsessions about regulation and taxes—property laws in Florida, for example—or issues like electability. In the same August episode after El-Sayed’s primary win, Travis compared the left-wing candidates he thinks will fail in this year’s general election to the more extreme right-wing Republican candidates who lost in 2022.
They see the show as something for an audience that may feel put off by fringe ideas or the more woo-woo trappings of their competitors. In Sexton’s words, the question of the show can sometimes be: “How do we compete against the crazy?”
Travis said: “There are flash-in-the-pans where you can get a lot of attention, but over time, if you’re constantly wrong or if you’re constantly crazy, I think you fail.”
Sexton, a 44-year-old former CIA analyst, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with peers including Ivanka Trump, with whom he went to tennis camp. He was trained in counterterrorism and did several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an intelligence officer, then worked for the New York Police Department before joining Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, a conservative news and commentary site, in 2011.
Travis, 47, grew up near Nashville, Tenn. A practicing lawyer with a creative writing master’s degree, he founded OutKick, a sports commentary blog, in 2011, and sold it to Fox for about $100 million in 2021. Fox News parent Fox Corp. and The Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.
Both hosts said they were raised in apolitical families. Sexton knew he aligned with conservative politics from a young age. Travis was a self-identified moderate liberal who volunteered on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and worked on Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper’s 2002 campaign for a House seat. (He was fired from Cooper’s campaign team after crashing the Congressman’s first wife’s car.) He said Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate he ever voted for, and that was in 2020.
“I don’t think I’ve really changed that much,” Travis said. “I think the world around me has shifted substantially, and I moved from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans.”
Guests on the show have included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Vice President Mike Pence and Taiwan President Lai Ching-te. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a frequent guest, once came on to talk about his love for baseball card collecting—his favorite rookie card is outfielder Ken Griffey Jr.—and Vice President J.D. Vance has been on to defend the merits of Cincinnati chili. Trump, who has also been a guest on the show several times, recently called Travis while the show was live to shoot the breeze about sports as he prepared to travel to South Carolina for a Darline Graham rally on Aug. 21.
“As someone who has been on almost every single radio show in the country, ‘Clay and Buck’ has to be one of the most enjoyable programs to join and listen to,” former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said via email. “They are both talented guys who don’t take themselves too seriously, which is something that cannot be said of many in the media business.”
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who was a longtime listener of Limbaugh’s show, initially didn’t think anyone could replace him. “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised,” he said.
He said he particularly appreciated their skepticism about official guidance during the Covid pandemic. The radio hosts were critical of masking and vaccination policies, as well as restrictions on public gatherings.
“There weren’t many people like Clay and Buck who were willing to buck the narrative of mainstream media when it came to our response to Covid,” Johnson said.
Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, another fan, said: “I think their audience really appreciated their willingness to go against the grain.”
In July, Sexton and Travis livestreamed their show for the first time on YouTube, part of a mission to grow their audience. In August, Travis also launched Sport & State, a media site with sports, politics and pop culture commentary that will soon feature live shows from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET.
“We’re not trying to necessarily just be the highest on the Nielsen rating,” Sexton said. The audience the hosts seek are “good guys that they would want to have as neighbors, not just guys that they listen to for entertainment value,” he said.
They said they are also hoping to reach more women, specifically young mothers.
“I want the woman who’s 25 or 30 or 35, who’s just had her first kid and is like ‘what’s going on?’” Sexton said. “Because God forbid they start watching ‘The View’ or something.”
Write to Ashley Wong at ashley.wong@wsj.com
