Dems launch a new effort to shore up white voters — by leaning into race

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.

As Biden begins to form the contours of his reelection campaign, it is clear economic issues will be at the forefront. The president is running on “Bidenomics,” a term first coined by his political opponents to describe an economy that's since showed signs of rebounding this year.

To drive home this point, during the last month Biden has traveled to South Carolina, a state Democrats have little chance of flipping in 2024, to tout his message of innovation and investment and how those are paying dividends in red-leaning districts.

He’s also planning to visit the North Georgia district of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – one of his biggest Republican detractors – to attend the groundbreaking of a solar facility.

“Joe Biden is going to go into areas that may not have been available to us before,” said Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist who is not involved in the White Stripe Project.

“Politically, that is very smart … and I think will be successful for him in 2024. What's successful mean? If it's one or two percentage points nationally, we know that can be the difference in winning and losing the election,” he added.

Officials with the Democratic National Committee tell POLITICO despite recent campaign stops to majority-white districts, there is no plan to abandon his championing issues of racial equity.

They point to the contrast in the last week where Republicans were having intraparty strife over whether there was a “personal benefit” to being enslaved, the same week Biden signed a bill creating a national monument to Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley.

“The Democratic Party is a party that fights for diversity, fights for equality,” says Lis Smith, another Democratic strategist not associated with the White Stripe Project.

She adds the party needs to be doing more than just be focusing on white working class voters.

“Democrats have been underperforming generally with working class voters, whether they're white, Latino or Black. And that's an issue that we need to work on,” Smith said. “But the solutions won't be found in turning our back on some of our most devoted voters.”

Organizers with the White Stripe Project say they are spending the summer ramping up. They plan to test some of their targeted messaging in turnout operations in this fall’s Kentucky gubernatorial race, where Democrat Andy Beshear is running for reelection in a state Biden lost by nearly 26 percentage points three years ago.

The group expects to compile a report with recommendations on ways to win with a multicultural coalition by the end of the year.

A version of this reporting appeared in The Recast. Subscribe today.