I've been saying this for years and I'll re-up it here:
It's fascinating to me the way the very political syndicated (and in some cases local) talkers only seem to do well on platforms that have decades of existing community goodwill as having been full-service voices. WBEN or WHAM (or WOWO or WTMJ) may not be growing any, but they hold their own among listeners 50- or 55-plus, sometimes enough to hang on to top-five slots in the 12-plus beauty contest.
But then as soon as you move their "star" talent somewhere else that doesn't come with that legacy reputation, it sinks like a stone. When Rush moved from WRKO to WXKS in Boston... hello, zero-point-something, and it never came back even when they moved him back. Same with KEIB in LA.
There have been essentially zero successful launches-from-scratch of new conservative talk stations as anything more than a niche play. It cratered for iHeart in Pittsburgh on WPGB-FM. It's also telling that in markets where there's been a lot of migration and significant parts of the 55+ population didn't grow up with local full-service radio there, the "legacy" stations have suffered more. If you move to South Florida when you're 64, it doesn't matter that WIOD was the full-service voice in the seventies and eighties. You don't remember that, and you're only going to tune into WIOD if you're in the niche that wants to hear the political talk.
My takeaway from that has always been that it's really the legacy memory of what these stations once were that has kept them strong(-ish), and that the political talk that pulls to the extremes has actually been along for the ride. Or, to put it more pithily: it's entirely possible that stations like WBEN have actually survived and semi-thrived not because of their political leanings, but in spite of them.
A final data point that helps back up my analysis here: the old-line AM stations that have leveraged their legacies in less politically-charged ways - the all-newsers like WCBS and WBBM and the handful of stations that stayed full-service with a little less of a political charge, like WGN and KFI, have generally done as well or better over the years as the ones that latched on to hard-core political talk.
If I'm right, it probably doesn't matter at this point; it's not as though WBEN or WHAM are going to change their stripes now, and even if they did, their reputations with younger audiences are what they are now. But it's an interesting thought experiment about how things could well have gone differently.
