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A large body of research highlights concepts related to status such as economic insecurity and threat as sources of demand for populism across democracies. But uncertainty remains over the mechanism through which status shapes populist attitudes. I first develop a formal model that clarifies how the subjective perception that one has low status relative to others leads to stronger populist attitudes. I find empirical patterns consistent with the model predictions from a nationally representative survey. Next, I propose a randomized survey experiment that causes variation in participants' subjective perception of their socioeconomic status to test for a causal relationship.