Progressives Can’t Give Up on White Voters

Progressive author and columnist Steve Phillips recently offered Democrats some provocative advice in the pages of The Nation: Stop trying to persuade white people to vote for them.

“Democrats,” he argues, “need to realize that if Donald Trump’s felony conviction won’t weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will.” Phillips sees the blind loyalty of hardcore Trump supporters as evidence that white voters who supported Trump in the past are irredeemably reactionary. As a result, he is left scratching his head as to why Democrats keep returning to this apparently poisoned well: “The dominant strategic focus of the Democratic Party has been and remains to woo white voters, but in my 30 years in national politics, I have seen precious few examples of empirical data and research guiding this quest to win white support.”

It’s not clear exactly what empirical data Phillips has seen, but there are pivotal examples in recent history that belie his claim. Take the 2020 presidential election. Scholars have estimated that around 6 percent of the electorate were swing voters (those who changed from one major party to the other between 2016 and 2020), and that 4 percent switched from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020. In turn, since whites represented 72 percent of the electorate in 2020 battleground states, and since Biden’s margin of victory in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona ranged from .3 to 2.8 percentage points, it is clear that white swing voters were a large enough bloc to decide the election for Biden.

Likewise, political scientists Nick Carnes and Noam Lupu have shown that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama regained a substantial share of working-class white voters lost by Dukakis and Kerry, respectively. So, they too were able to woo white voters, and one of them did so while being Black. Ironically, Phillips acknowledges the fact that Obama—famously reticent around issues of race and racism—enjoyed surprising popularity with at least a portion of white voters who later turned to Trump. Is it really the case that among the voters in the 206 counties that pivoted from Obama to Trump, the vast majority are simply lost to a rageful white nationalism?

Worse, Phillips’s focus on “white rage” as the main source and sustenance of Trump’s appeal not only allows him to dismiss a huge swath of the electorate, it assumes that only white voters are drawn to Trump. But liberal fears about the rage frothing just beyond the blue suburbs obscure a more complicated reality: It’s not just white people who are angry. While the vast majority of Black voters and most Latinos still vote blue, we see a worrying trend among non-white working-class voters who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party since 2012. And if recent polling around the 2024 election ends up being anywhere close to correct, we will likely see an even more pronounced shift of working-class Black and Latino voters toward Republicans in the fall. This is to say, confronting Trump requires casting a wider lens than one that looks at the election primarily through the prism of race and racism.

As to Phillips’s claim that nothing will persuade most Trump voters, that is correct, as far as it goes. But we’re not aware of anyone who argues that Democrats can or must win over “most” white Trump voters. In fact, we need only a sliver of this demographic in key swing states.

Democrats can and should keep trying to win over the admittedly small but strategically critical group of undecided working-class white (and increasingly non-white) voters who feel that Trump speaks to their anger at living in a rigged economic system and seeing the communities get eviscerated by decades of mass layoffs.

Despite his stark pessimism about white voters in general, however, Phillips does purport to want to help Democrats with this group (after all, they still make up some 70 percent of the population). Based on a recent report authored by the Sandler Phillips Center, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and the Working Families Party, he offers some recommendations on “how to best expand the white stripe of the rainbow” that is the Democratic coalition. Among other dubious claims about the causes of Trumpism and the motivations of white voters, he argues that candidates can increase support among progressive-leaning infrequent white voters by running “toward—not away—from racial issues.” “Over and over again,” the report asserts, “the data showed that a race-forward approach was more successful at moving white voters than a race-neutral or centrist approach.” Yet the evidence provided (or in some cases not provided) leaves us with more questions than answers.

The report cites a range of studies its authors claim have demonstrated the efficacy of messaging based on the “Race Class Narrative” (RCN) approach. The RCN approach emphasizes the importance of messaging that explicitly invokes cross-racial solidarity rather than employing “color-blind” language that underscores class and not race. But in the few cases where it’s possible to find detailed information about the design and findings of these studies—in many cases, we could find no published results of any kind—the results do as much to call the RCN approach into question as they do to shore up its empirical bona fides.

Indeed, two of the three rigorous, independent academic studies of the RCN framework we could find (two by Joshua Kalla and Micah English, one by Nathan Kalmoe) directly contradict the claim that RCN-based messaging outperforms alternatives. In fact, one concludes that “racial framing generally decreases support for progressive policies.” And that “Democrats’ use of racial frames in describing their progressive policies may inadvertently make it harder for them to adopt public policies that will advance racial justice.”