"The Same Old Candidates Failed Us": Responses to Populist Rhetoric in Primaries

• In Event: Primary Voters: Sincere, Strategic, or Silent?

Abstract

The past decade has been marked by a rising tide of populist politics throughout the democratic world, and the United States is no exception. The Democratic and Republican Parties both have populist factions which have surged to prominence in recent contests. These factions are visible and vocal at the elite level and in the mass public alike. I consider the characteristics of voters who support candidates who frequently use populist rhetoric in intraparty contests. Drawing on a wide range of prior scholarship, I define populist rhetoric as that which features both anti-elite and anti-plural cues and accordingly either asserts or implies that the government has sold out the “real” people in favor of some undeserving “other” group. Furthermore, I identify three distinct strains of populism: economic populism, wherein the "others" are defined by class; social populism, where the "others" are demographic or ideological; and governmental populism, where politicians as a collective group are framed as the unworthy "other." I hand-code text from a selection of Senate candidates’ primary campaign websites in 2022 to ascertain how Democratic and Republican candidates across eight states (Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin) employed populist rhetoric in their messaging to voters. I do not classify candidates themselves as populists or non-populists. Rather, I identify the proportion of issue statements on a candidate’s webpage which feature economic, social, and governmental populist rhetoric. I hypothesize that likely primary voters from both parties who believe that the government is untrustworthy and does not care about their problems will be more likely to support candidates who use a higher proportion of populist rhetoric. I then employ survey results from those eight states in the lead-up to the 2022 primaries to ascertain whether certain sorts of voters were more likely to support candidates who employed populist rhetoric, paying particular question to those respondents’ views upon the government. I control for a wide range of demographic characteristics and consider other aspects of respondents’ worldviews as well. While there are variations between the individual case studies, I broadly find that likely primary voters who are mistrustful of government were more inclined to support candidates who used more populist rhetoric in 2022’s Senate primaries.

Author

• Brian Michael Brew, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill