It’s not just 2018, either. Populism has fared well as a political strategy over the last generation — a period, not coincidentally, when living standards for most Americans have risen with frustrating slowness.
Trump’s populism is a mirage, but many voters believed it in 2016. He was the rare Republican who criticized free trade and seemed to care more about protecting Medicare than reducing the budget deficit. Trump managed to out-populist Hillary Clinton, and it’s a part of why he won.
Four years earlier, Barack Obama was the populist candidate. He ran for re-election casting himself as the defender of working people and Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy. The 2012 Obama was “more populist than any major party presidential nominee in decades,” as a column in The Guardian put it. The 2008 Obama, of course, ran against the financial crisis occurring on George W. Bush’s watch.
The Democratic president before Obama — Bill Clinton — ran as a populist, too. It’s true he also pitched himself as a centrist rather than a liberal. But populism isn’t the same as liberalism. Most voters don’t tote up all of a candidate’s policies and try to figure out his or her precise ideology. They care more about the values a candidate projects, and Clinton sold himself as an ally of workers.
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