Republicans Are Pushing an Obsolete Technology for a Nefarious Reason

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One dying vestige of hot-dog-and-apple-pie America could get a fresh lease on life if a bipartisan bill recently passed by the House, the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, clears the Senate and hits President Donald Trump’s desk. The law would require that all new vehicles sold in the U.S. be able to tune to the AM band. It would be a lifeline for AM radio, which has been declining: More than 340 stations have shut down since 2015. There are just over 4,300 left, according to Radio World, a trade publication.

If you’re under 50, you may not have thought about AM radio … well, ever. Even people who fondly recall spinning the dial on road trips in their used Chevys, or who still check in for weather and traffic updates, might just shrug if amplitude modulation broadcasts signed off for good.

AM arrived in cars in the 1920s as an appealing value-added feature, but nowadays it is a liability for the automakers’ EVs because the signal can interfere with certain systems and requires special shielding. They’d like to offer just FM, the cooler, higher-quality successor. Some have struck deals to provide streaming access to AM radio. (This is exactly what we did when I worked at Fisker, an EV startup that folded in 2024.)

The bill’s backers insist that AM radio cannot vanish from the dashboard because it’s critical during emergencies. If the internet goes down and your mobile device is bricked, you could always fire up your ride and tune into AM for instructions and updates. But of course, you could also do this with FM radio. Or you could buy a hand-crank emergency radio.

So we get to the real reason the fate of AM radio in cars is suddenly a focus of attention on Capitol Hill: Republicans in Congress must be loath to lose the devoted, near-captive audience they have relentlessly propagandized via talk radio for decades. In the phrase created by the Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler and his colleagues, the right-wing media created a “propaganda feedback loop” starting with Rush Limbaugh’s show in the late 1980s and 1990s, designed mainly to reinforce tribal identity with repetitive, outrage-stoking narratives. The current version of the GOP has its DNA deeply embedded in these airwaves. More centrist outlets that make up the rest of the media landscape, in Benkler’s analysis, have not offered anything similar that might benefit Democrats. Three decades on, right-wing radio listeners aren’t looking to acquire information so much as participate in an identity-confirming ritual—often while in their cars.

Conservative talk radio is pretty much the only radio over-50 residents of red America ever hear. When they turn off the Fox or Newsmax TV news playing inside their homes and jump in a vehicle, conservative chatterboxes such as Clay & Buck and Sean Hannity and fringe agitators like Jesse Kelly are there waiting for them.

Every single day, from morning until evening, the AM stations that carry these programs disgorge a bonanza of right-wing talking points. Compared with eclectic, moderate news radio, conservative talk is impressively disciplined and rarely off-message. There were entire weeks in 2024 when Joe Biden’s “cognitive decline” was tracked as urgently as an approaching Category 5 hurricane, as were the Biden family’s allegedly criminal activities. We were never allowed to forget Hunter’s laptop. There was steady repetition of the phrase “witch hunt,” as Trump called the federal investigations and prosecutions of him. In 2025, the need to root out and eradicate “DEI” was a biggie, as were diatribes promoting American “energy independence” via prioritizing oil and natural gas, and in what seemed a surprise twist, calling out antisemitism. The notion that “extreme left Democrats are communists” found an early and frequent national airing on these programs.

Nowadays, you will hear about how real patriots can handle higher gas prices and should endorse a “secure” Southern border. GOP politicians have been routine guests, proclaiming the downfall of the republic if listeners fail to hew to the Republican agenda. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas is still and forever “Talafreako,” even as the Talarico campaign has reversed the diss by selling T-shirts that embrace the term. Right-wing radio listeners would have no way of even knowing that, of course, since their feedback loop doesn’t let in information outside their own narratives.

Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, have folded in the face of the “emergency” argument.

But really, emergency public notification, my foot. (My foot on the accelerator, in fact.) The modern incarnation of the GOP arguably owes its existence to AM radio. Clay & Buck, after all, took over the time slot that was previously filled by Limbaugh, the OG microphone-as-megaphone gasbag. The American right doesn’t want its most avid partisans, aging folks who don’t stream and aren’t in the market for an EV, to be cut off from the agitprop. The GOP doesn’t trust and can’t control podcasters like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. As with most GOP concerns, don’t overlook the moneymaking aspect, either. Conservative talk is supported by businesses that also support Republican politicians: goldbug investment schemes, the firearms industry, various shadowy nutritional supplements, and, of course, MyPillow. Out of three hours of Hannity’s show, it seems like two are some kind of sales pitch, frequently delivered by the host himself in testimonial, trust-me fashion. The broadcasters, meanwhile, don’t want to lose the revenue.

For the auto industry, this AM radio obsession is maddening. Even their typically rather conservative trade group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, has said since 2023 that AM is unnecessary for emergency alerts and an impediment to making better cars. Interesting experiments in the business, like the new Slate barebones EV pickup, forgo the radio altogether. You get a cellphone mount and Bluetooth connectivity.

I’m as nostalgic as the next Gen X radio obsessive who remembers long rides in my 1980s Mazda, searching the AM spectrum for engaging chatter. During a stint in the 2010s working in radio, I also served regularly as the cheerful liberal punching bag on a conservative show helmed by witty conservative upstart Andy Dean, and it was tons of fun. There’s something raggedly cool about AM versus the slicker products on the FM side. Thanks to favorable physics, AM signals also travel much farther—I once picked up a station in Chicago at nighttime while driving through North Carolina. Proper radio lovers love AM, no matter whom they vote for.

But in the end, the Great AM Radio War of the 2020s seems to have been won by the army that absolutely leans right.

Or maybe it just won a battle. For younger motorists, the first move when getting behind the wheel is to override the in-car infotainment system, including the radio, by activating Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. Even if AM is installed by law and the libs are still regularly owned on its airwaves, a new generation, regardless of political party, might not even know it exists.