The Rise of Anti-Elite Rhetoric in Congressional Campaigns

The past decade has witnessed a sharp rise in anti-establishment politics in the United States, but its origins remain poorly understood. Is anti-establishment sentiment primarily an ideological phenomenon of the far right and far left, or does it represent an independent dimension of political conflict? Does it emerge through the entry of new outsider candidates, or through adaptation by established politicians to changing voter demands? To address these questions, we construct a new dataset of more than 12,000 congressional candidates running in primary and general elections between 2010 and 2024, drawing on over one million sentences scraped from their campaign websites. Using large language models and supervised machine learning, we classify the degree of anti-establishment rhetoric in each candidate’s platform. We then examine how the prevalence of anti-establishment appeals has evolved over time and the extent to which it reflects candidates’ ideological positions, occupational and socioeconomic backgrounds, district characteristics, or strategic responses to challengers. This approach provides the first systematic portrait of the rise of anti-establishment rhetoric in U.S. congressional elections and the types of candidates and contexts in which it emerges.