Disgust with the elites is rampant in America today, and it shapes our politics on both the Left and the Right. President Trump rode a populist wave into office not once, but twice by railing against the elites and promising an “America First” economic agenda. Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani, an avowed democratic socialist, won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary against one of the best-known names in New York politics, Andrew Cuomo, while Bernie Sanders and AOC continue their nationwide “Fight the Oligarchy” tour.
It’s tempting to focus on what unites the populist energy on both sides of the aisle: a shared hostility to a ruling class that has overseen the downward mobility of labor and the shrinking of the middle class. But what divides today’s Right-wing populism from its Left-wing counterpart is equally important. If either side hopes to craft an agenda that appeals beyond its base, it will have to grapple with what it’s missing.
Both camps diagnose the same problem: a corrupt elite that has disinherited the American working class and lined their pockets with the proceeds. But when it comes to the solutions to that problem, the Left and Right have different answers. Yet each side is missing a piece of the puzzle.
Before Trump, the GOP was defined by social conservatism, free-market economics, and foreign interventionism. It was for war and free trade, and against gay marriage and abortion. But Trump took an ax to every one of those commitments.
He abandoned free trade and questioned foreign entanglements, believing that America should mind its business and focus on US interests, rather than the Sisyphean task of spreading liberal values across the globe. And, while gesturing toward a moderate social agenda, he made economic populism his true platform. In his second term, he’s only doubled down: mass deportations, tariffs, and a revived industrial policy. He made illegal immigration a centerpiece, launching nationwide deportation campaigns that have drawn both condemnation and praise. He escalated a global trade war, levying tariffs across America’s trading partners. He issued executive orders to expand AI training to help blue-collar workers access good-paying technology jobs, and claims to have brought in more than $10 trillion in manufacturing investment.
This is the core of why he won the majority of working-class Americans: his economic populism got to the heart of what they felt they had lost thanks to disastrous trade deals like NAFTA, or disastrous immigration policies endorsed by the elites of both parties that allowed the foreign-born population of the United States to balloon to 15 percent. In industries that swelled their ranks with illegal migrants, wages stagnated. Immigration and the economy were the top concerns for voters in the 2024 election — two issues which often overlap for workers on the lower rungs of the labor market. Trump’s promise to deport every illegal migrant won him votes from workers who had never supported a Republican before, including millions of Hispanics. His populism — call it Protectionist Populism — spoke directly to them. Because this promise is so central to his success, his recent comments about allowing illegal farm and hotel workers to stay has engendered immense pushback from the base.
But this is not the only populism on offer now. The Left has its own version — one equally hostile to what it calls “the oligarchy,” but proposing different solutions. Sanders campaigned for president on free college, free health care, and a higher minimum wage — funded by taxes on the rich. AOC and Mamdani have adopted this model, too.
Rather than limiting the supply of labor or foreign goods to drive up wages, the populist Left proposes taxing the rich and beefing up the welfare state. Instead of empowering workers to demand more from employers, it would redistribute wealth through subsidized housing, health care, transit, and childcare.
This marks a turn away from the identity-first politics of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, who leaned on the historic nature of their gender and race in their campaigns for President. Left-populists today offer something more universal: class war. The rich, they argue, are too rich — and they should “pay their fair share” so that the working class and the poor can receive more benefits from the government, given that their low-paying jobs aren’t likely to represent anything close to a living wage. Let’s call this redistributionist populism.
“The redistributionist message, paradoxically, was unpopular with the very people it was supposed to help”
But here’s the surprising twist: despite its economic focus, redistributionist populism appears most popular among the young and the educated. Voters without college degrees preferred Cuomo; those with advanced degrees preferred Mamdani. Mamdani beat Cuomo with New Yorkers earning more than $100,000 a year, but Cuomo crushed him among those earning under $50,000. Mamdani also lost decisively in neighborhoods with the highest concentration of black voters.
The redistributionist message, paradoxically, was unpopular with the very people it was supposed to help, while it was most popular with young, disillusioned, overeducated urbanites.
That’s not to say their preferences are illegitimate. They vote, too, and have become the Democrats’ new base since the working class drifted to Trump. But their overwhelming support signals that Mamdani’s success in New York City isn’t likely to translate much further, not least because of the position Mamdani has taken on immigration. Mamdani opposes ICE raids and was seen in a widely circulated video attacking Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar. It was a revealing moment.
The Democrats once opposed immigration on the very grounds that the Right now does: It depresses workers’ wages. But now that their base is educated professionals — the consumers of low-wage labor — it is very much in their financial interest to increase the number of workers allowed illegally into the country. They mostly talk about immigration in moral terms, stressing things like compassion for the global indigent and due process. But the economic logic remains — and lately, they’ve become less shy about saying so, fully admitting that they oppose mass deportations because they are taking away a pliant workforce. As Gov. Gavin Newsom recently bemoaned during the riots over ICE raids in LA, Trump’s “agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers, and seamstresses.” Or think of the outrage from Democrats when ICE agents raided a meatpacking plant in Nevada where dozens of illegal migrants were using forged papers. (Weeks later, the waiting room to apply for jobs was full of American applicants.)
Meanwhile, the MAGA movement’s Protectionist Populism really does resonate with many workers. Interviewing working class Americans across the country recently, I found a consistent message: they overwhelmingly preferred Trump’s protectionism to neoliberalism or redistribution. They rejected the paternalism in the Left’s ideas about how to help them, and appreciated the autonomy baked into Trump’s vision. A better wage meant independence. A closed border meant a job worth keeping.
It is not just anecdotal. In poll after poll, the majority of Americans support deporting undocumented migrants. The Democrats’ attempts to reclaim their status as the party of the working class will fail until they stop fighting against the wishes of the majority of Americans — especially on immigration.
Yet there’s a glaring blind spot in Protectionist Populism: namely, health care. It’s the one issue where working-class voters are still aligned with the Left over the Right. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira has pointed out, the two most popular demands among working-class Americans are less immigration and more access to affordable health care. There is huge overlap between Americans who want a much more populist approach to health care and those who want a much more hawkish approach to immigration. Teixeira’s reporting showed that stricter proposals on illegal immigration also aligned with support for Medicare negotiating drug prices. He wrote, “these pro-Medicare populists favor the idea that we should simply, ‘Round up undocumented immigrants, detain, and deport them to their home countries’ by 24 points.”
Trump himself seemed to grasp this. He has shown a willingness to force drug companies to negotiate prices, yet his Big Beautiful Bill showed Republican lawmakers willing to drop millions of people from the Medicaid rolls and endanger rural hospitals. The GOP seems to be acting on muscle memory, ignoring that its base is no longer the rich but the working class. The base has changed, but in too many ways, the party hasn’t. Republicans in the House and the Senate are still committed to giving tax cuts to the rich (wildly unpopular) and treating health care like it’s a commodity.
It’s no surprise that health care is the only area where the Left holds the advantage, because the Right won’t seize it. Whether it’s the protectionist populism of the Right or the Redistributionist Populism of the Left, each has recognized a piece of the puzzle. A broader perspective that combined much less immigration with much more access to affordable health care could lead to a windfall for whichever party seizes it first. If either side were willing to embrace the complete wishes of the hardest working Americans and embrace a platform that pushed both for expanding health care access and for radically reducing immigration, they would have a ruling majority for a very long time.
