That's how we show him the exit
Last week my post included a discussion of a research project conducted by the folks at Demos, which looked at the most effective types of messaging for progressive politicians when it comes to race and class. Since then, the authors of the study, Ian Haney López and Anat Shenker-Osorio, have published their thoughts in a Washington Post op-ed piece. This essay will share the guts of the piece and discuss the implications, as well as recent related events.
After conducting surveys of 2,000 voters from Minnesota, California, Ohio, and Indiana, the data indicated that “Democrats can prevail by telling a story that ties together race and class, calling out the right’s exploitation of racial anxiety as a tactic to divide and distract.” Interestingly, but not surprisingly, they also found that including elements of race-baiting made Republican messages far more effective than they were without them. Conservatives know they can’t win without that hateful tactic.
Here’s one of the most important sections of the aforementioned piece:
The race-class message describes racism as a strategy that the reactionary rich are using against all people. By moving away from conversations about racial prejudice that implicitly pit whites against others, the race-class message makes clear how strategic racism hurts everyone, of every race. It signals to whites that they have more to gain from coming together across racial lines to tackle racial and economic injustice than from siding with politicians who distract the country with racial broadsides. “The politicians,” a white guy in our Ohio focus group said, are “telling us you have to hate the black man because he does all the bad stuff . . . They’re dividing us so they can conquer.” A white woman in the group responded, “If we would all come together, the politicians wouldn’t have the strength they have.”
This analysis is vital. For politicians and campaigns, a focus that condemns wide swathes of white voters as racist, or which otherwise alienates people that the authors characterized as “persuadable” whites, is going to hurt progressives at the ballot box. On this topic, here’s what the executive director of Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions Center, Alana Conner, had to say:
Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere. It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.
More broadly, a vast array of research has shown that getting white voters to focus on their identity as whites makes them more likely to vote conservative. However, a progressive message that ignores race completely doesn’t work either, the Demos authors found, as doing so weakens support for progressives among voters of all colors. The Demos “race-class” message aims the target where it belongs, on the conservative politicians who use race-baiting rhetoric to divide working- and middle-class whites from people of color in order to win power—which they use to screw over both groups.
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