Thread by @_waleedshahid

So the good folks at @Demos_Org (@anatosaurus, @hmcghee, @tamaradraut, @IanHaneyLopez) just put out an amazing report (complete with polling and focus groups!) about how to talk about BOTH racial and economic anxiety! demos.org/sites/default/…

The polling measured responses on questions related to race and class from Base voters, Persuadable voters, and the Opposition.

Here's one of their key findings about Persuadable voters:

They have complicated and nuanced positions on issues related to race and class.

But these voters are responsive when they hear bold, populist messaging that explicitly talks about dog whistle politics as a form of divide-and-conquer by the wealthy and well-connected.

Here's some of their messaging recommendations on combining a message about race and class.

The message of elites using racial fear to divide and conquer working people is effective.

And evoking race explicitly to address economic and racial anxiety IS effective. You don't have to shy away from it.

Bottom line: a lot of the racial vs economic anxiety debates talk past each other and don't really get at how these issues are so inextricably connected.

And when you talk to voters about that connection, they resonate because they intuitively get it too!

This is also a major intervention to begin to forge a fusionist politics & message among progressives on the left, the kind that @MattGrossmann & @DaveAHopkins say helped form the modern Republican Party's core identity and message (dog whistle politics to fuel corporate greed).

The discoveries are not new. This kind of fusion race/class messaging was pretty prominently used by some of the most important leaders in American history committed to multiracial democracy.

Or perhaps put more bluntly by President Lyndon Johnson.

Barack Obama would occasionally speak about how elites seek to divide-and-conquer all working people. But it was not a central theme of his presidency.

See his major speech on race in 2008 and his 2017 farewell speech.