Democrats appear to be serious about building on 2020 and 2022's gains among white non-college men in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, gains that produced Senate wins for John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock, but were nowhere near what was needed for Tim Ryan in Ohio, Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, or Cheri Beasley in NC.
A new Democratic-aligned initiative — dubbed the White Stripe Project — has a novel idea for winning white working class voters back to the Democratic Party: lean more into talk of equity and race.
Organizers say traditional methods in wooing white voters are ineffective, often relying on knee-jerk recommendations from an elite group of Democrats that pushes a race-neutral economic message. White Stripe organizers say this approach is misguided. They are calling for a more targeted and data-driven approach that they argue will be a better return on investment.
The project has plans to build a robust infrastructure to attract white voters who are open to Democratic messaging but who are less likely to vote. Once identified, organizers are betting with targeted messaging and pinpoint engagement that enough of these voters will show up for the party at the ballot box.
“White voters have disproportionate political power,” Erin Heaney, Executive Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) told organizers during the Monday afternoon launch of the project. “We need a strategy for engaging and organizing them alongside communities of color.”
While President Joe Biden’s performance among white voters in 2020 improved over Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, Republicans still dominated this segment of the electorate. According to Pew Research Center, Biden carried 33 percent of this bloc, while then-president Donald Trump carried 65 percent. The caveat, according to Pew, was that the vote total Trump carried with non-college educated white people was “nearly identical” to what he pulled in 2016.
The White Stripe Project believes these voters are gettable.
“We need to have a public, non-defensive, data-driven conversation,” said Steve Phillips, a Democratic political analyst and author who serves as President of the Sandler Phillips Center which studies voting demographics. It’s one of the progressive groups that formed the project.
One group that may not buy the message is Democratic donors. Phillips says far too often Democrats and deep-pocketed donors settle on narratives about past elections that then inform future contests with little empirical data.
As an example, he said he has heard rumblings from those in the party that Stacey Abrams’s two-time loss in Georgia’s gubernatorial contest is proof that race and equity issues do not fare well in close elections.
Phillips doesn’t believe that race-centered issues should be abandoned in favor of a more race-neutral economic message. He is quick to point to another Democratic loss in Ohio last cycle.
“We also don’t talk about Tim Ryan in Ohio, who really did manifest this playbook about downplaying race and leaning into economic issues, and he lost badly,” Phillips said. “So what do we make of that?”
But race as a wedge issue can’t be ignored, say the White Stripe organizers. Instead, it should be tackled head on as Republicans embrace culture-war issues like critical race theory and battling the so-called “woke agenda.”
“We know that race is an incredibly powerful tool to keep people, white people, silent and separated from the multiracial coalitions we need to win,” said Heaney, who leads one of the principal groups spearheading the project.
The numbers are hard. In some states, white non-college voters make up a majority of the electorate, and two-thirds to three-quarters voted for Trump/Republicans in the last two elections.
But a lot of non-college voters sat both elections out. I can understand the plan: targeting white non-college voters with "people are suffering because of these MAGA bastards, and your vote, you choosing to join this fight, can make a real difference." Even a percentage point or two in the right couple of states means the difference between Trump or Biden, and control of Congress.
Even if all it does is counteract the Christofascist recruitment and radicalization efforts to keep us at 2020/2022 numbers, the Dems will prevail.
It's not a panacea. but at this point we can't abandon any bloc to the GOP. We all have to fight, that's what a coalition is.
We'll see if it works.
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