Before Donald Trump, there was Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, announced on Tuesday, may ultimately do more good for the person offering her support than the person receiving it. Once a major national figure and a candidate for the vice presidency, Palin has spent the last couple of years in relative exile, surfacing intermittently on cable news and in obscure reality TV programs.

It would be fitting if Trump managed to resuscitate Palin’s standing in the Republican Party. As Sen. John McCain's running mate in 2008 and as a tea party firebrand in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, Palin, Alaska’s then-governor, crafted a public persona that presaged Trump 2016 in its stew of nativist politics, television theatricality and unforced folksiness. She helped pioneer a style of mass-market Republican populism, and Donald Trump is walking in her mama grizzly tracks.

Palin introduced that style in her speech to the 2008 Republican National Convention. An unknown quantity at that point — she received little notice outside Alaska before McCain chose her — she could legitimately be considered a political outsider on the national stage, a fact she spun to her advantage.

“I’ve learned quickly these last few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,” she said in her convention speech. “But now, here’s a little news flash. Here’s a little news flash for those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”

Later polling found that Palin’s divisive rhetoric (at one point she suggested swaths of the country did not count as “real America”) alienated many voters. But it held a magnetic attraction for at least one element of the Republican base: white, working-class voters with low incomes and relatively little education.

A May 2011 Gallup poll of Republicans and GOP-leaning voters found Palin narrowly besting eventual 2012 nominee Mitt Romney among those making less than $59,000 per year. Among those making less than $24,000, she trounced Romney by a double-digit margin and beat fellow populist Mike Huckabee. Poll respondents who did not attend college went for Huckabee, with Palin coming in just 3 points behind.

Like her, Trump positions himself as a defender of American authenticity against its enemies in the establishment and boasts with some accuracy of being an outsider in Republican circles. No matter that Trump hails from rich, cosmopolitan New York City, which Palin would likely exclude from her “real America.” He is nonetheless a champion for a particular vision of national identity uncorrupted by globalization, immigration or political correctness.

This vision, more than any coherent political program, lies at the heart of both Trump’s and Palin’s appeal. That’s one reason Trump, much like his hockey mom predecessor, does best among less-educated, working-class white people.

If Palin never ascended to the same heights as Trump in presidential polls, maybe it’s because she was ahead of her time. Her rise to national prominence came shortly before the Great Recession and the attendant birth of the tea party. By the time the GOP’s populist right had elbowed its way into the Senate and hounded House Speaker John Boehner into retirement, her star had faded.

The time was ripe for another anti-establishment agitator to pick up the torch, and that’s precisely what Trump did.