Dems launch a new effort to shore up white voters — by leaning into race
The White Stripe project is taking a more “data driven” approach to recapturing a bloc that has been lost to Democrats for years.
By Brakkton Booker
08/01/2023 04:11 PM EDT
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.
more
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/01/democrats-white-stripe-2024-elections-00109234
