The lone Republican vote in the Senate last month to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees came from an unlikely Democratic ally: Senator Josh Hawley, the archconservative from Missouri best known for calling out “wokeness” in all sectors of society, and for raising his fist to offer solidarity with supporters of President Trump hours before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
And yet the overdraft vote was hardly the first time Mr. Hawley had stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2023 he introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, which died in committee for lack of Republican support. He has broken from his party by refusing to vote for cuts to Medicaid as part of the budget reconciliation process.
In March he joined a Democrat, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, to offer a bill that would speed up the contracting process for new unions. A G.O.P. senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, signed on as a cosponsor, but otherwise, Mr. Hawley said in a recent phone interview, “not a single Republican would touch it.”
Since his arrival to the Senate in 2019 at the age of 39 as its youngest member, Mr. Hawley has charted two seemingly parallel courses: as a full-throttle champion of socially conservative causes and, somewhat less noisily, as a populist who aligns himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, on many populist issues.
“His ultimate goal is to break the alliance the social conservatives have had with the corporate world since the Reagan era,” said Matt Stoller, a former Senate aide to Mr. Sanders.
The term “populist” conjures two raw-knuckled protagonists of the agrarian South, Andrew Jackson and Huey Long, with whom the whippetlike Mr. Hawley, a Missouri banker’s son who attended Stanford and Yale Law School, would seem to have little in common. But prioritizing working-class Americans over elites has been a key rhetorical theme in Mr. Trump’s political ascendancy, and Mr. Hawley has embraced it.