The Politics of Protagonists: How Hero Frames Are Redrawing Electoral Logic

In our recent work at PharosGraph, we found a simple but striking pattern in three of the most closely watched races of 2025. In New York City, Virginia and New Jersey, the winning candidate was also the one most consistently framed as the hero in public narratives.

Our Hero Score measures how often a candidate is cast as the protagonist in the story. It is not a poll. It is structural analysis of how language reveals agency, virtue and responsibility across thousands of articles, posts and public statements. In all three contents, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill and Zohran Mamdani were more often positioned as figures who could act decisively and credibly on behalf of voters. Each of them won.

At first glance, this might look like a narrow campaign insight. In reality, it points to something larger happening in democratic societies. Joseph Heath's essay on "Populism fast and slow" helps make sense of the deeper forces at play.

Populism As a Rebellion Against Cognitive Elites

Heath argues that we should stop treating populism primarily as an ideology and instead see it as a political strategy that privileges a particular style of thought. Populism aligns itself against slow, effortful, analytical reasoning associated with experts and institutions.

Populist leaders do not simply say different things from elites. They think, speak, and perform in a different cognitive register. Their intuitive, unfiltered style feels more authentic to many people who experience modern life as a relentless test of executive function. In Heath's framing, populism is less a rebellion against economic elites than a rebellion against cognitive elites and the burdens that complex, rules-based societies impose on ordinary people.

This helps explain why criticism from intellectuals often strengthens populist leaders. Every denunciation confirms the underlying narrative: common sense versus fancy theories, instinct versus overthinking, the people versus those who insist that everything is more complicated than it looks.

Heroic Framing as a Different Way of Resolving Cognitive Tension

If populism resolves the tension between intutitive and analytic worlds by rejecting the latter, heroic framing resolves it by bridging the two.

Our findings suggest that voters are drawn to candidates who appear able to carry complexity on their behalf. The public are not only choosing between left and right. They are choosing between different ways of coping with an environment that demands constant cognitive effort yet still feels unstable and difficult to navigate.

Another reason hero framing is so powerful is that it functions as a cognitive shortcut. Framing an actor as a hero, villain or antihero is itself a heuristic that allows people to make rapid judgement without doing the slow, effortful work of evaluating policy detail or institutional design. Most voters are cognitive misers. They rely on narrative roles to understand who is acting, who is resisting, who is responsible and who has moral authority. These roles condense vast amounts of information into instantly recognisable patterns. Once a candidate occupies a role, especially a hero role, they become easier to trust in a world where attention is scarce and complexity is overwhelming.

A political hero is not simply a positive character. They play a structural role in how people navigate a cognitively demanding world. A political hero performs several specific functions, they:

• absorb complexity so others do not have to, taking on the cognitive load that modern institutions and policy problems impose.
• turn institutional power into visible agency, showing voters where action will come from and who is capable of delivering it.
• provide a moral red thread in a confusing landscape, giving the story coherence when the environment feels fragmented or unstable.
• reconcile intuitive and analytical worlds, translating expertise, rules and constraints into a form that feels immediately understandable and aligned with common sense.
• personalize accountability with systems that otherwise feel abstract or unapproachable, offering voters a recognizable figure they can evaluate and trust.

These functions help explain why heroic framing resonated so strongly for the winning candidates in 2025. They were able to operate inside complex institutional settings while still appearing as clear, decisive agents in the narrative field. They bridged the gap between fast and slow thinking in a way that neither pure technocrats nor pure populists could manage.

Two Speeds of Politics, One Search for Agency

Put together, we can see two broad patterns shaping contemporary politics.

Fast politics, represented by populist movements, speaks directly to intuitive cognition. It privileges common sense, moral certainty, and visible punishment. It delivers agency by attacking cognitive elites and the systems they manage.

Structured heroism, by contrast, accepts the constraints of institutions but works actively to occupy a clear moral role within them. It communicates in a way that is intuitive without being simplistic, and purposeful without being technocratic. It offers voters a figure who can think slowly on their behalf while acting quickly in the story they understand.

Our Hero Score analysis suggests that when this structured heroism appears clearly in the narrative field, it can win decisively.

Considerations for 2026 and Beyond

If democratic institutions continue to demand more and more cognitive effort from citizens, while everyday life feels harder to navigate, the reservoir of resentment Heath describes will not disappear. Populism will always be ready to convert that resentment into a narrative of common sense betrayed by elites.

The alternative is not to double down on lectures or technocratic explanations. It is to become more intentional about the roles political actors occupy in the public imagination.

A different strategic approach requires: 

• Respecting the intuitive burden people live with, rather than dismissing it as ignorance.
• Designing communication that is easy for people to understand, but does not reinforce the mistakes that intuitive thinking can produce.
• Showing how expertise helps an actor voters can recognise, not a system they cannot see.
• Creating feedback loops that show voters their concerns are being heard and acted on, so that institutions feel responsive rather than remote.

In 2025, voters did not only reject certain parties or policy platforms. They rejected certain narrative roles. They chose candidates who appeared as heroes in a world that often feels built by and for cognitive elites.

If we take Heath's arguement seriously and combine it with what we see in narrative data, a sharper conclusion emerges. The future of democratic politics will belong to those who can bridge fast and slow thinking, not just in their policy design but in the stories, they allow the public to tell about them.

PharosGraph's role in this is straightforward. We do not script these stories, and we do not campaign. We show, with structural clarity, how public narratives cast each actor and how those roles are likely to shape voter judgement long before a survey is fielded or a ballot is cast. In a world where people decide quickly and trust slowly, understanding the narrative architecture is becoming essential.

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