Helen Jasper

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Reilly, Jack

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump was registered as a Republican, but he ran a distinctly populist-nationalist campaign. His platform had a few simple characteristics: anti-immigrant, anti-political elite, and pro-making America great again. While he only narrowly won the election thanks to the Electoral College, his message was strong enough to carry him past 16 opponents in the Republican primary election and led him to only narrowly lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in the general. As the 2020 election draws nearer and as populism continues to flourish as a global phenomenon, it is important to consider the place of populism in American politics and why it serves as such a powerful appeal. This paper provides a basis of research on how populist values became embedded in the American political framework that determines how people think and talk about politics, and how the embeddedness of this populism affected the 2016 election. It does so by first seeking a definition of who the ‘people’ are in America, then examining how the sanctity of this definition is preserved by isolating an ‘other’, before using these explorations to paint a contrast between the populisms of Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016.

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