Progressives want to grow the ‘White Stripe’ of a multiracial coalition – POLITICO

With help from Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala, Jesse Naranjo, Jessica Piper and Teresa Wiltz

People wait in line to vote on Election Day, Nov. 8, 2022, in Atlanta. | POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP

What up, Recast fam! Campaign finance reports reveal Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs are fundraising juggernauts, but theyre also burning through cash and fast. House Democrats effectively sideline their top lawmaker on the Agriculture Committee and the U.S. womens national soccer team squeaked into the knockout round with a 0-0 tie with Portugal in the group stage. First, a look at a progressive play for white voters.

A group of progressive organizations is banding together with hopes that not even a seven nation army could hold them back from electoral victory in 2024.

The initiative dubbed the White Stripe Project aims to woo white voters in greater numbers to liberal causes and supply empirical data to challenge the conventional ways Democrats traditionally engage with this crucial voting bloc.

Without white voters, organizers admit, taking back the House and defending control of the White House and Senate will likely be an impossible mission.

We know that white communities organized by the right get in the way of winning on just about every issue that we care about, said Erin Heaney, executive director of Showing Up for Racial Justice, one of the principal groups spearheading the project.

White voters have disproportionate political power, she told organizers in remarks during the Monday afternoon launch of the project, shared exclusively with The Recast. We need a strategy for engaging and organizing them alongside communities of color.

There is growing frustration, particularly among Democratic activists, that the partys efforts trying to win back white voters, particularly those without college degrees, is ineffective. This voting bloc has broken for Republicans for the last four election cycles.

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While Joe Biden performed better among this group in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did four years earlier, Republicans still dominated. According to the 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 whites was nearly identical to what he pulled in 2016.

To put it another way, the group believes these voters are gettable with the right message and a targeted, not blanket approach.

We need to have a public, non-defensive, data-driven conversation about what do we really know about white voters? said Steve Phillips, a longtime Democratic thought leader who is president of the Sandler Phillips Center.

Far too often, he said, Democrats and deep-pocketed donors settle on narratives about past elections that then inform future contests with little empirical data to back up those entrenched beliefs.

One of those narratives, he and other activists say, is the notion among the donor class that a focus on racial issues should be abandoned, in favor of a more race-neutral message centered around the economy.

Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, left, and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams face off in a televised debate, Oct. 30, 2022, in Atlanta. | Ben Gray/AP Photo

Some Democrats grumble that Stacey Abrams loss in Georgias gubernatorial contest last cycle to incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp is proof that a candidate that highlights race and equity issues does not fare well in close elections, according to Phillips, the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.

But Phillips is quick to counter with another example: the race between Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan a Democrat who ran his campaign almost exclusively focused on winning back working-class white voters. He still lost by 264,000 votes to Republican J.D. Vance.

Ryan really did manifest this playbook about downplaying race and leaning into economic issues, Phillips said. And he lost badly.

So what do we make of that?

Race as a wedge issue cant be ignored, say the White Stripe organizers, as they point to Republicans embrace of culture issues like critical race theory and the so-called anti-woke agenda animating the GOP base.

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, Haney added.

As Biden begins to form the contours of his reelection campaign, it is clear economic issues will be at the forefront. Hes running on Bidenomics, a term coined by his political opponents to describe a once-flagging economy, but one hes flipped to showcase how its rebounded during the post-pandemic months.

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

Biden also signaled hes 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. He released a campaign ad using video of her own speech talking about Bidenomics and comparing him to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. It was clearly meant as a dig at Biden, but he embraced it, tweeting, I approve this message.

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

Politically, that is very smart and I think will be successful for him in 2024. Whats successful mean? If its 1 or 2 percentage points nationally, we know that can be the difference in winning and losing the election, he adds.

Its not just the president whos looking to play this up. The House Majority PAC, the super PAC raising millions to support congressional Democrats, is encouraging them to brag more about the economy when theyre home in their districts during the August recess.

President Joe Biden speaks at Auburn Manufacturing Inc. on Friday, July 28, in Auburn, Maine. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo

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

They point to the contrast in the last week when 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, said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who is not associated with the White Stripe Project. She adds that the party needs to do more than just focus on white working-class voters.

Democrats have been underperforming generally with working-class voters, whether theyre white, Latino or Black. And thats an issue that we need to work on, Smith says. But the solutions that wont 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 talks with different partners to determine which strategy and spending targets will be the most useful to help mobilize white voters. This includes testing some of those turnout operations in the upcoming Kentucky gubernatorial race, where Democrat Andy Beshear is running for reelection in a state Biden lost by nearly 26 percentage points.

They expect to compile a report with recommendations on ways to win with a multicultural coalition by the end of the year.

It goes without saying you know were going to keep tabs on this one.

All the best, The Recast Team

SUPER PAC TAKEAWAYS

Yard signs promoting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024 line the street leading up to a GOP congressional fundraiser on May 13. 2023, in Sioux Center, Iowa. | Tom Beaumont/AP Photo

The filing deadline for super PACs backing presidential candidates revealed the extent to what wealthy donors are paying to keep their preferred White House hopeful financially viable. Of course, the typical disclaimer applies: Super PACs cant directly coordinate with a presidential campaign, but can raise unlimited sums of cash and spend it to help boost their candidates.

The most eye-popping figure of Monday nights deadline: Never Back Down, the primary PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is sitting on nearly $97 million after raking in a mind-boggling $130 million since the beginning of the year.

As my POLITICO colleagues Jessica Piper and Sally Goldenberg point out, $82.5 million of that was shifted from a PAC set up for DeSantis gubernatorial campaign last year. Its still an impressive total that should keep him afloat for the long haul.

Then theres Sen. Tim Scott, who has seen his profile elevate amid reports of DeSantis campaign stumbles. His aligned super PAC, Trust In The Mission PAC, or TIM PAC, notched a respectable $19 million through July 31. This comes on the heels of the PAC announcing in mid-July that itll drop $40 million in advertising for Scott in the fall.

And the SFA Fund, the primary PAC for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, pulled in similar totals as Scott, Haleys fellow South Carolinian with $18.7 million. It has, to this point, spent very little of that, and still has more than $17 million in cash on hand.

Over in Trump world, the former presidents joint fundraising committee, which raises money directly for his campaign as well as a leadership PAC that has been picking up some of his legal expenses, reported raising $53.8 million in the first half of the year. However, as Jessica and Zach Montellaro report, Save America PAC [has] collectively spent $57 million over the same period. It is fueling serious questions about whether the PACs burn rate is sustainable through a general election campaign, should Trump win the GOP nomination.

ICYMI @ POLITICO

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