Is Populism Popular?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 18, 2025

 

As ever, ‘generic Republican’ is still the most potent political brand in America.

 

For more than a decade, America has been in the throes of a populist ascendancy that shows no signs of slowing down. Americans, the nation’s tastemakers insist, just can’t get enough populism!

 

The populist Republicans insist that the GOP isn’t populist enough, that real populism hasn’t been tried, and that the only cure for the ills of populism is more populism. And yet, according to the equally populist left, the avatar of right-wing populism, Donald Trump, falls short of his own populist ideals. Only those with unalloyed faith in governmental power and a willingness to use the state to engineer social outcomes can meet the moment, and that can only describe populist progressives. Populist revolts are popping up all over, because that’s the name of the game now. If you aren’t catering to and reinforcing the public’s anxiety, you will be crushed by it.

 

That’s conventional wisdom, anyway. And yet, we are confronted with a confounding but durable fact of American political life: generic Republican remains the most potent brand in politics.

 

The latest evidence for this proposition comes to us via Emerson College’s pollsters:

 

 

As a general matter, a “moderate” outperforms a progressive Democrat or a MAGA-aligned Republican, but a “moderate Republican” manages to secure the poll’s top performer slot.

 

I can already hear some of you racing to correct the delusion under which I’m laboring. “Moderates” do well because the American public likes the word “moderate,” but the milquetoast mundanities who assign that vaporous label to themselves aren’t competitive candidates. They don’t enthuse small-dollar donors. They don’t generate organic attention. They don’t win races. And as for the “generic Republican,” don’t you remember that Mitt Romney lost his bid to unseat an incumbent president who also happened to be a generational political talent?

 

If you’re persuaded that the above is the more sophisticated political analysis, let’s peruse the results of another poll, from Echelon Insights.

 

Asked to choose between two competing statements of economic philosophy, more than 60 percent of respondents were more inclined to agree with the supposition that “we should make life more affordable by lowering taxes on working families and reducing government barriers so we can increase the supply of essentials like energy and housing, which would bring prices down.” By contrast, just one-third of respondents backed the more populist outlook that relies on the government to “fund subsidies for things like childcare and health insurance, helping to directly lower families’ out-of-pocket costs.”

 

That relatively neutral framing (contrasting MAGA with conventional conservatism rather than with ill-defined moderation) revealed that the public is generally more favorable to supply-side economics than it is to both parties’ ongoing efforts to subsidize demand for goods and services, some of which are increasingly unaffordable because the public sector subsidizes the demand for them.

 

All of this might seem contradictory. The voting public’s revealed preference is clearly for populist firebrands ­— at least at the level of the two parties’ primary electorates. How does that square with these stated policy preferences? It all makes more sense when surveying the record on economics that Trump established in his first term.

 

By and large, Trump spent 2017 to 2020 outsourcing the economy to conventional conservatives. By default, his policies leaned in the direction of supply-siderism. He signed into law reforms to retirement accounts and 401(k)s, making savings easier to withdraw. He reformed the tax code and allowed Americans to keep more of their money. He slashed onerous and costly regulations that had targeted productive sectors, thereby providing more flexibility and certainty to businesses looking to invest and grow.

 

At some point during his stint in the political wilderness, Trump became convinced that the architects of the economic status quo circa 2019 that so many Americans wanted to see restored were his enemies. Gary Cohn, Mick Mulvaney, Paul Ryan, the various “Steves” in Trump’s orbit — all were cast aside in favor of figures who reinforced the president’s protectionist instincts and encouraged his penchant for profligacy. They assured the president that what the public wanted was more populism, and, so far in Trump’s second term, that’s what voters got. The public’s dissatisfaction with that project is apparent both in the president’s sagging polls and Trump’s obvious trepidation over his deteriorating political position.

 

But voters got plenty of economic populism from Joe Biden, too. They got legislation that allowed the federal government to fix drug prices. They got an antitrust campaign that enjoyed more failures than successes (good luck in the Mamdani administration, Lina Khan), but nevertheless targeted airlines and event-ticketing companies for hiking prices. They got an endless series of attacks on billionaires, big businesses, and the nameless elite who supposedly refuse to “pay their fair share.” Throughout the second half of Biden’s only term in office, his advisers urged him to press the populist pedal to the metal. He did just that, but voters didn’t seem to appreciate the results. That is, in part, due to big government’s inability to deliver prosperity.

 

It’s undeniable that voters are in a mood to reward political pugilists who oppose the status quo, whatever that happens to be at any given moment. But they also want to see their circumstances improve, and most seem to think that they — not the government — are best equipped to materially improve their own lots.

 

“Americans may not be the kind of free-marketeers libertarians would like them to be, but the economic principles they support are a long way from socialism,” North Carolina State University professor Andrew Taylor wrote in a summary of his recent research:

 

There is little evidence they wish to change the contours of the country’s post-war economy, one characterized by low taxes, moderate regulation, often generous support of public goods like defense, education and scientific research, and, despite an increasing tolerance for government debt, relatively little redistribution. They do hold somewhat liberal attitudes on education and have become more progressive on health care and the environment, but they save their most conservative attitudes for subject matter at the heart of the economy like social welfare, employment, taxes and the regulation of domestic commerce.

 

Taylor may be right, but he’s screaming into a void. Both parties are convinced that what voters want is a more expansive government to cosset them and bubble-wrap life’s sharp edges. They are aligned only in their shared conviction that the other guys’ populism is inauthentic. What the voters demand, both tell themselves, is more of the same but louder. Perhaps. Or maybe voters want the politicians to get out of their way.