It’s not (just) the economy, stupid
Recent events should be the nail in the coffin for the centrist popularism discourse
In recent years, pundits from the more conservative wing of the Democratic coalition have adopted a philosophy that they call popularism. The motivation behind popularism “is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal” than typical Americans, and so if these allegedly far-left elites are left to their own devices, they will craft policies and campaign strategies that are out of step with ordinary voters. To correct for this supposed bias, popularists urge campaigns to utilize opinion polls to find out “what the median voter actually thinks” and then tailor policymaking and communications to those findings.
The appeal of popularism lies in its apparent common-sense logic: To win elections, Democrats should do and say things that are popular, and they should avoid doing and saying things that are unpopular. But in practice, popularism tends to be biased toward the conservative political leanings of its proponents. There are substantive criticisms of popularism that attack its basic premise, questioning whether voters really do care as much about policies as popularists claim. But even if we accept its fundamental reason for existence, there are real flaws in…
