My article with Claire Willeck about how colleges can help students turn out to vote just published in @polbehavior.bsky.social nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Nearly half of Trump’s 2020 campaign money came from non-wealthy donors, yet GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill cuts health benefits for ~11.8 million while preserving tax breaks for the rich.

Question now: Can Trump’s “plutopopulist” coalition hold? cup.org/4cfm0Az

Grok, what is crony capitalism?

I'm just glad one of these men has the nuclear codes and the other has all our personal data.

Democracy thrives on equality.

Equality requires inclusion.🏳️‍🌈

Our democracy is strongest when everyone can participate fully and authentically. Happy Pride to all who make our communities more vibrant and our democracy more complete.

Statement from the NJAG Matt Platkin

Plutopopulism: Wealth and Trump’s Financial Base SEAN KATES, ERIC MANNING, TALI MENDELBERG and OMAR WASOW Comparative scholarship suggests authoritarian candidates often rely on backing from the wealthy. The wealthy are also said to play an important role in American campaign finance. Studies of Donald Trump, however, found that he drew significant support from white Americans with less education and privilege. We evaluate wealthy and non-wealthy Americans’ financial support for Trump, compared to other candidates, by constructing a comprehensive dataset of property values matched to contributions and voter files. We find Trump underperformed among wealthy Republican donors while mobilizing new non-wealthy donors. Trump also diversified the donorate, especially by education. That is, Trump built an unusual coalition of wealthy and non-wealthy donors. Our results support an alternative, “plutopopulist” model of Trump’s financial base.

The GOP’s identity crisis over Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” exposes a core tension in today’s Republican Party: a “plutopopulist” coalition where wealthy donor interests clash with the party’s increasingly non-wealthy voter base. 🧵 1/ cup.org/4cfm0Az

Opinion | How Does a Stymied Autocrat Deal With Defeat?

"It’s futile to predict specifically what Trump would do. Unpredictability is one of his characteristics." Professor Tali Mendelberg quoted in @nytimes.com guest essay @talimendelberg.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/o...

Co-authors on “Plutopopulism: Wealth and Trump’s Financial Base” are Sean Kates, Eric Manning and @talimendelberg.bsky.social . cup.org/4cfm0Az

Action Center | COSSA A consortium of Social Science Associations works to communicate the importance of social & behavioral science research to policymakers. The powerful stories come from people who express how it is…

🚨 Urge your senators and house representatives to support for FY 2026 Science Funding! Send a quick note to your House Representatives and Senators urging them to sign each of the Dear Colleague Letters.

Learn more at the COSSA Action Center: buff.ly/bHQ66dc #WhySocialScience

Supreme Court lets Trump ban transgender troops while case continues LGBTQ advocates said the Trump administration’s purge of transgender troops is unconstitutional and will hurt national security and waste resources.

This is a shameful decision that hurts national security, flies in the face of DoD's own decade-long experience with transgender soldiers who have served honorably, and is flatly unconstitutional. What a disgrace.

Warnock: Don’t lecture to me about meritocracy while I witness you nominate the most unfit unqualified people we’ve ever seen.

You cannot lecture me about merit while nominating Pete Hegseth…

Fascinating.

For a longer, more detailed overview of the Plutopopulism paper, see: bsky.app/profile/owas...

The oligarchy debate isn’t either/or. Our data reveal that candidates like Trump in 2020 (and Obama in 2012) are able to build unusual “plutopopulist” coalitions combining reduced (yet substantial) elite support with massive non-wealthy mobilization. cup.org/4cfm0Az

Figure 3 in paper. Bar charts showing Percent Change in Fundraising between Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016 and 2020, by Wealth Rank. In 2016, Trump lost 73% of Romney’s dollars from the top 1%, but lost only 55% of Romney’s dollars from the bottom 90%. In 2020, Trump recovered among the wealthy: the top 1% contributed similar totals to Trump and Romney, and the top 0.1% gave Trump 16% more than Romney. However, the most striking result from 2020 is Trump’s increased fundraising from the non-wealthy. The bottom 90% gave him 172% more than Romney. These findings reveal that Trump’s financing depended much less on the wealthy than did Romney’s. To be sure, Trump fully recovered wealthy dollars in 2020. But he more than recovered non-wealthy dollars. Trump’s non-wealthy dollars and shares are dramatically larger than Romney’s (and the largest in the figure). Open access link to paper: http://cup.org/4cfm0Az

In 2020, Trump’s support surged among non-wealthy donors. Compared to Romney, Trump’s support among bottom 90% grew 172%, while top 1% was basically flat. 4/ cup.org/4cfm0Az

Figure 2 in paper presents the proportion of a campaign’s itemized total from each wealth group in stacked bar charts. Each bar represents a candidate-year, with segments showing the percentage of total dollars that come from each of four wealth bins. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump was much less reliant on the wealthy than Romney. Compared to Romney, Trump’s share of dollars from the bottom 90% is 9 percentage points higher in 2016, and 20 percentage points higher in 2020. In dollar terms, Trump got 2.7 times more dollars than Romney from the bottom 90% (in 2020). Likewise, Trump’s share from the top 1% (the sum of the top two bins) is 9 and 15 percentage points lower than Romney’s. To be sure, most of Trump’s dollars still came from the wealthy. Even in 2020, the wealthiest 10% gave him 55% of his dollars. However, the bottom 90% nearly matched them. To put this in sharp relief, the candidate with a wealth distribution of dollars closest to Trump’s in 2020 is Obama.

In terms of donors, Trump complicates the oligarchy story. While most of his 2020 funding (55%) came from the top 10%, that’s the lowest reliance on wealthy of any candidate we studied. Nearly 45% of 2020 donations came from bottom 90%—a remarkable shift for a Republican. 3/ cup.org/4cfm0Az

Plutopopulism: Wealth and Trump’s Financial Base SEAN KATES, ERIC MANNING, TALI MENDELBERG and OMAR WASOW Comparative scholarship suggests authoritarian candidates often rely on backing from the wealthy. The wealthy are also said to play an important role in American campaign finance. Studies of Donald Trump, however, found that he drew significant support from white Americans with less education and privilege. We evaluate wealthy and non-wealthy Americans’ financial support for Trump, compared to other candidates, by constructing a comprehensive dataset of property values matched to contributions and voter files. We find Trump underperformed among wealthy Republican donors while mobilizing new non-wealthy donors. Trump also diversified the donorate, especially by education. That is, Trump built an unusual coalition of wealthy and non-wealthy donors. Our results support an alternative, “plutopopulist” model of Trump’s financial base.

Is America an oligarchy?

Bernie and AOC say yes, touring the country to “Fight Oligarchy.” Other Democratic leaders aren’t so sure.

With the debate heating up, I wanted to share a few insights from our recent paper on who’s funding American politics. 🧵 cup.org/4cfm0Az

Co-authors on “Plutopopulism: Wealth and Trump’s Financial Base” are Sean Kates, Eric Manning and @talimendelberg.bsky.social. cup.org/4cfm0Az

Opinion | There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab (Gift Article) The patriotic response to today’s threat to American democracy is to oppose Trump soberly and strategically.

‘The best way to support American democracy is to build the largest possible coalition to defend it. It is to call out all Mr. Trump’s constitutional violations while diligently avoiding exaggeration about what qualifies as a violation.’

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants.

"This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

Contact your Representative and Senators & urge them to support investments in NSF and NIH.

The Administration’s proposed cuts to these vital agencies will harm #science and hinder our prosperity, health, and well-being.

www.psychologicalscience.org/act-now

Opinion | Which Is More Dangerous, Trump Triumphant or Trump in Trouble? The president, one psychologist says, is a perfect example of authoritarian personality syndrome.

Worth reading: Edsall summarizes social science insights about the behavior of autocrats when things don't go their way.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/o...

A word cloud, with words of different sizes, and different colors, with purple for the largest, red medium, and green small. "Black" stands out prominently in purple. In red, we see "climate", "student", "network", "justice", "identity", "teacher", and "undergraduate".

Who bears the brunt of these cuts? Well, here's a word cloud of the most frequent terms from the titles and abstracts of terminated grants, with word size proportional to frequency:

You get two more: Congratulations Dr Taboni!

Democrats keep saying America is an “oligarchy.” Is that true? A political scientist explains “oligarchy” and argues that America has earned that label.

“In an unequal society, party of the wealthy has a choice—it can embrace democracy even if it means some redistribution. Or it can try to undermine democracy by elevating divisive cultural and racial issues…” —@leedrutman.bsky.social
www.vox.com/politics/410...
(Cites Plutopopulism cup.org/4cfm0Az)

Someone really needs to do something about it.

There’s just no end to this.

With Trump’s new executive order targeting ActBlue, worth revisiting how much his 2020 campaign relied on non-wealthy donors. In 2020, Trump raised 2.7x as much from the bottom 90% as Romney did. Grassroots fundraising was central to his strategy.