Economic populism is finally getting its due — at least in election post mortems. Even the most milquetoast of liberals have identified the prime culprit of Kamala Harris’s defeat as her failure to center Americans’ economic anxieties and frustration. Indeed, Donald Trump’s brand of populism delivered him a surprisingly strong showing among working-class voters — particularly working-class Latinos.
As our work with the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) has shown, there is substantial evidence to support the argument that a stronger emphasis on economic populism could have helped the Democrats. We’ve found that candidates who focus on economic populism perform better — in both experimental tests and in real congressional elections — than candidates who do not. In fact, just before the election, our survey testing Harris messaging among Pennsylvania voters found that populist messaging was her most effective approach for winning working-class support.
Yet as a number of figures around the Democratic Party have noted, there are important reasons to question whether populism alone can truly solve the Democrats’ working-class woes.
John Halpin, for example, makes a convincing argument that economic populism “is a necessary if insufficient component for building a multiracial working-class coalition in the Democratic Party.” Ruy Teixeira goes further, calling economic populism the “Opiate of the Democrats.” He criticizes the “magical thinking” employed by some on the Left that seems to suggest that “simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities.” “Culture matters — a lot,” Texeira argues, and turning the populist dial up to eleven won’t drown out…
Auteur: Jared Abbott
