Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. “Populism” is one of those words that gets used constantly, but it’s rarely pinned down. Everyone agrees we’re living in a populist era, but almost no one agrees on what that means or how you’d measure it. For the past two years, ISMA, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, has been trying to do exactly that: a national survey built around specific, testable definitions of populist attitudes, first fielded on the eve of the 2024 election, and now repeated in June of 2026.
The second round results just came back, and the headline finding is a bit of a surprise. Trump’s hardcore populist base has shrunk by about a third.
To walk through what the survey found and what it tells us, ISMA policy fellow and The UnPopulist's senior editor, Andy Craig, is joined by the man who designed and ran it, Tom Shull, editor at large of The UnPopulist and ISMA’s director of survey research.
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