“I understand people have issues with Anthony Albanese and the Labor government,” podcast host and influencer Abbie Chatfield tells her hundreds of thousands of listeners at the top of a 90-minute interview with the prime minister.

One of the most popular podcasters in the country, the Sydney-based media personality and former Bachelor reality TV star is a gateway to the eardrums and Instagram feeds of young Australian women.

It’s why companies pay to advertise their products on her show It’s A Lot (as a well-known pharmaceutical company did with its UTI range on Friday’s episode). It’s why the prime minister sat down with her, after the UTI ad, in a bid to speak directly to voters.

“It takes time to get there, you can’t change the whole country in three years,” Albanese tells Chatfield, responding to criticisms she relays from her listeners about the government not having done enough or being bold enough in its first term in office.

Albanese’s appearance is part of a strategy we’ve seen a lot already, and will continue to see. Facing growing voter disengagement and apathy – as evidenced by limp approval figures for both Albanese and Peter Dutton – politicians are looking to leverage popular social media personalities to reach audiences who might never normally give them the time.

Some commentators called Australia’s 2022 poll “the TikTok election”. This year’s could be “the influencer election”.

The election date speculation continues, but it’s becoming increasingly pointless – the campaign has essentially already begun in nearly every tangible sense, with the prime minister and his opponent already making daily (sometimes multiple) media appearances crisscrossing the country to visit key marginal seats.

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On Friday, as the podcast dropped on listening services, Albanese was in Adelaide at a summit organised by a local newspaper during the day, then in Wollongong for a night-time speech announcing $500m to encourage new jobs in clean energy manufacturing “starting with wind tower fabrication”.

Dutton was in Adelaide at the same summit, a day after appearing at a Sky News antisemitism event where he made contested remarks about citizenship ceremonies.

But for all the argy-bargy over Medicare, the public service, public safety and infrastructure, the real clincher in a tight election may be a few votes shifted here and there through lighter chat about wedding plans or favourite TV shows.

Over the course of the Albanese interview – which Chatfield explained had been produced into two versions for her audience, a 1.5-hour version “if you’re a political girly pop”, and a shorter 60-minute version “if you’re looking for a quick answer” about Albanese’s views – the pair discuss the prime minister’s upcoming wedding, Labor’s policy slate, Donald Trump, war in the Middle East, and criticisms of Dutton and the Greens.

Chatfield says her audience is “predominantly Green voters, or a bit further left than Labor”, but goes on to readily admit “my primary goal in this is to get Labor back into government … it is biased”. She asks tougher questions about the environment, carbon emissions and Palestine than might have been expected on first glance, but it’s not the toughest interview of Albanese’s career – nor was it intended to be.

Instead, the opportunity to speak to a captive audience of young people was too good to miss for Albanese – the podcast gets 400,000 monthly downloads and Chatfield has 520,000 followers on Instagram and 572,000 on TikTok.

Dusting off his well-worn anecdotes of his log cabin story and his serious car crash in 2021 for a new audience who may have never given him much time previously, the prime minister went heavy on Labor’s achievements and policies on women’s health, university fees, childcare, climate change and the gender pay gap.

Albanese often gets flak for his verbose communication style, tangling his talking points, going off on a tangent when answering questions, or getting snippy with journalists (a criticism also made of Dutton). But in this more relaxed, long-form podcast format, he seems more at ease, cracking jokes and telling stories, speaking clearly as he explains Labor’s policy achievements in simple detail – something he hasn’t always been able to do in front of press conference cameras.

Albanese and Dutton are, of course, spending much of their time on traditional media appearances via press conferences, AM and FM radio, broadcast TV and newspaper interviews. But going through non-traditional media is becoming an important weapon in their communications arsenal.

Both men appeared on Mark Bouris’ podcast; Albanese has appeared on daily news podcast The Squiz and social media-based news outlet, The Daily Aus, while Dutton has done a long-form chat with Sky News.

Of course, these kind of interviews don’t always become instant hits. The Nine newspapers pointed out Dutton’s interview with former diver Sam Fricker, one of the first examples of this new trend, only got 5,000 views on YouTube despite the channel’s 5.88m subscribers.

It’s early days, but clips of the interview on Chatfield’s Instagram had already racked up nearly 30,000 likes on the platform as of Friday afternoon.

It’ll be a tight finish. Every comment, like, share or subscribe counts.