Programmatic Populism vs. Vibes Populism

Does populist politics require populist policy?

There’s a tension I struggled with in writing Party of the People, and one I’ve continued to grapple with since its release: how to square the political success of populism with the fact that, at least until Donald Trump’s second term, we haven’t seen a truly populist, worker-focused Republican economic agenda. Are nationalist policies like tariffs what Trump’s working class coalition are truly asking for? Do they matter at all in terms of electoral success or public opinion?

What we have is a disconnect between Programmatic Populism and Vibes Populism.

Vibes Populism is populism as it’s expressed by voters: the system is rigged, the politicians are corrupt, and the elites have sold out the country. What we need is a wrecking ball like Trump to demolish the status quo.

This kind of populism gives voice to voter anger. You hear it clearly when you go out in the real world. But when it comes to policy, its demands tend to be vague and emotionally driven: just fix what the elites broke. It’s about style, attitude, and affect. Trump thrives in this space—he talks like his base, thinks like his base, and shares the same enemies. He sees them and understands them.

What I’ll call Programmatic Populism, by contrast, represents a comprehensive policy vision for a New Right. It seeks to translate the emotional energy of Vibes Populism into concrete pro-worker, nationalist economic policies. One of its main intellectual proponents—JD Vance—is now Vice President. Think tanks like American Compass and its new magazine, Commonplace, which I recently contributed to, are leading this conversation. Their agenda to prioritize the economic interests of working- and middle-class voters includes tariffs, reindustrialization, a more adversarial posture towards corporate elites, and more fiscal support for families, ideally so they have the choice of raising kids on one income.

The start of Trump’s second term has brought these tensions into sharp relief.

A portrait of social and economic stability, courtesy of ChatGPT

A victory built on vibes

What I’m calling Vibes Populism was the foundation of Trump’s 2024 victory.

There was something unique about 2024 compared to the other times Trump ran: his populist critique of conditions in the country was broadly popular. The working class of all races flocked to Trump, inverting the traditional partisan income divide for the first time in recorded polling history. A huge part of this was working- and middle-class frustration over high costs. Unlike in 2016, a supermajority of voters agreed with Trump’s basic position on immigration, a thermostatic reaction to Joe Biden’s handling of the border. And in my focus groups, swing voters would connect things like taxpayer dollars spent on illegal immigrants to the internationalist push for aid to Ukraine. They saw the country taking care of foreigners before it would take care of them.

But not once in these groups did I hear anyone mention frustration with foreign trade, or propose tariffs as a solution.

In a sense, the moment for that was 2016. The 2016 Obama-Trump voter came from deindustrialized areas in the Upper Midwest gutted by foreign competition. But the 2024 Realignment voter looked different: it was younger, more diverse, urban, mostly male—the main losers in the post-Covid inflationary period. The 18-year old nonwhite male who David Shor tells us is just as likely to be a Republican as a Democrat is likely not pining for the reindustrialization of America; they were not even born when America was an industrial nation. Many of these young men are service workers or gig workers.

In 2024, the clear mandate of the voters was to deal with the immediate problems of inflation and the border. Trump has done the latter and time will tell if he can do the former. But tariffs would be a complication, as it likely runs counter the central demand of Trump’s 2024 coalition: get prices under control. It’s clear that many members of this new coalition are viewing the economy primarily through the lens of their experience as consumers, rather than as part of a neo-industrial working class.

Which policies are they asking for?

Beyond short-term relief from their current woes, what policies is this working class coalition asking for?

Outside of the current crisis, voters generally don’t think about policy solutions—and even then their preferred answers can be ill-defined. The exception are issues like immigration and public safety that have a direct, law-and-order response.

That means policy experts often have wide latitude to design solutions that voters haven’t necessarily asked for or thought much about. Just because people haven’t asked for a policy, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be beneficial. But there are risks that must be considered: offending some moral sensibility (allowing in illegal immigrants versus just denying them entry), running counter to your coalition’s other demands (tariffs’ potential to increase prices), triggering loss aversion (entitlement reform), or risk of backfiring because it’s the wrong response to the problem at hand (many of the Biden-era policies).

One successful example of Trump repositioning the Republican Party on policy was his ruling out changes to Social Security in the 2016 primaries. One can argue if this was responsible policy, but it was a rare example of Trump meeting a non-negotiable policy demand that the old party wouldn’t commit to. Our polls show 70%+ support across the GOP coalition—MAGA and non-MAGA—for a policy of not cutting entitlements to balance the budget.

And we can say that the public leans to the left on economic issues, so all things being equal, a Republican perceived as more moderate than the norm on economic policy should do better. The issues with the calculations in this chart aside, the famous post-2016 scatterplot expresses this clearly:

But this doesn’t necessarily equate to a burning desire for a nationalist-populist economic policy program. Because most people aren’t economics experts, the positions people take in a survey on economic policy issues often aren’t that important to them. Ask people if they want tax increases on the rich, and they say yes, but test their revealed importance by randomly testing different policy platforms, and they have no effect.

Socially, values and principles matter. Economically, things mostly just get judged on results—how well people think things are going—regardless of the principles. So it’s harder to organize voters around a set of economic principles than it is around social ones.

And more than policy, what does matter electorally is the positioning of the candidates—the vibes they project, whose side are they on.

The Clinton analogy

Bill Clinton is an instructive example. In 1992, he won as a middle class champion. He felt your pain. In Party of the People, I use a September stump speech he gave in Albany, Georgia as a masterclass in how to connect with the average voter:

In the morning I go running on the streets in Little Rock and all sorts of people come up to me. I knew how important the family leave bill was a couple of years ago when I stopped my morning jog at the local McDonald’s about two blocks from a homeless shelter and a young couple came up to me living in a homeless shelter because they both had to give up their jobs when their kid got cancer and they had to bring their child to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital and there was no medical and family leave provision in our law to protect people like that. I want you to know that I may not have all the answers and I won’t always tell you what you want to hear, but I will wake up every day thinking about you, and your interests, and your hopes, and your children, and your future.

Is this populist? In a strict policy sense, it’s not much of anything. But in the way I use it throughout the book, it is. And that’s defined by winning with a working and middle class coalition with rhetorical and policy thrusts against wealthy, out-of-touch elites (then Republicans, but now more and more, Democrats).

Editorial note: This is the kind of campaign you want to run! It’s much more emotionally satisfying and effective than one that whines about “class warfare” or slights against entrepreneurs (“you didn’t build that” from 2012). And Trump’s central political achievement is figuring out how to make it work for a Republican.

But eventually, you have to turn campaigning into policy, and both Clinton and Trump 1.0 veered against populism in important ways.

Clinton campaigned as a populist, but governed as a new-age technocrat, passing NAFTA—the central villain in the story of deindustrialization.

Trump’s main economic accomplishment was the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, a fairly conventional Republican tax package. Renewing this remains a central commitment of his second term. He did tariffs, but not nearly to the extent of those proposed today. And the end result of his first term is that voters remembered his economic management fondly, a core advantage that risks going away.

If there was any backlash to these populist betrayals, it wasn’t at all evident in the election results or the polls. Clinton was soundly re-elected after NAFTA and remained popular throughout his term. And Trump was re-elected without any grumbling in any quarter of the populist MAGA base.

Are vibes enough?

Of course, short term political success doesn’t rule out long-term disaster. That’s what the Programmatic Populists argue happened with NAFTA. Vibes Populism didn’t turn out to be enough for Clinton. The repercussions weren’t felt in the short term, but were definitely felt by his wife in 2016.

Trump’s defenders would say you have to govern how you campaigned. Trump talked about tariffs on the campaign trail and is now delivering on them, even if they weren’t a big priority for voters. Democrats attacked the tariffs as a “national sales tax” and those attacks didn’t register. Nothing during the campaign suggested that Trump should make tariffs a top priority of his first 100 days. But nothing necessarily suggested that he shouldn’t either. And Trump is deeply committed to them.

Still, voters don’t feel like enough attention is being paid to their top economic concern—the cost of living. Trump’s approval on handling of the economy—a key strength in 2024—is below his overall job approval. And if the cost of living isn’t addressed—or is made worse by tarrifs—populist frustration will continue to mount. But this time, it will be against Trump.