Voter turnout is the way to defeat the pop­u­lists

Peter Spiegel (“Biden gets oppon­ent he wants but loses moral high ground”, Instant Insight, Janu­ary 25) says it is “incred­ibly cyn­ical” for Pres­id­ent Joe Biden’s re-elec­tion cam­paign team to hold up Don­ald Trump as a threat to Amer­ican demo­cracy but then to hope he wins the Repub­lican nom­in­a­tion.

In our con­tinu­ing ana­lysis of 20 recent elec­tions, pitch­ing demo­crats against pop­u­lists in mul­tiple coun­tries, we see that a route to suc­cess for the former is a con­sid­er­able rise in turnout, as happened in the US in 2020, and Poland in 2023.

The pop­u­list vote, being based on an emo­tional per­sonal loy­alty to its can­did­ate, is gen­er­ally solid and imper­vi­ous to per­sua­sion. Extra voters must be found on the lib­eral side.

Oppon­ents of pop­u­lism need to gen­er­ate, in the minds of the lib­eral abstain­ers, a very strong determ­in­a­tion to defeat the pop­u­lists.

The issue is not always about demo­cracy. It can be about immig­ra­tion, abor­tion rights or endemic cor­rup­tion. It depends on the national con­text.

But in the US it is undoubtedly the fear of chaos and undemo­cratic action.

David Cowan and Chris Pow­ell
Lyndhurst, Hamp­shire, UK