Assessing the impact of Donald Trump on state-level discourse

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 has often been characterized as part of a larger populist wave sweeping Western democracies. However, claims about populism’s pervasiveness often lack empirical support, particularly at the subnational level. This research note introduces the US Governors Populism Database (USGPD), providing the first quantitative measures of populist rhetoric among state-level officials in the United States. Analyzing 400 speeches from 100 governor terms across all 50 states, we find that a political system with a populist national leader is not necessarily associated with high levels of subnational populism. While Republican governors show higher levels of populist rhetoric than Democrats, this difference predates Trump’s presidency and shows no evidence of intensifying following his first election. By providing systematic evidence about populism’s presence and diffusion across different levels of government, this study demonstrates how populist rhetoric manifests differently across governmental tiers and contributes to scholarship examining populist discourse in multi-level political systems