This seems a bit counterintuitive to me but who knows, maybe it will work. A progressive group plans to try to win over white voters by leaning in to talk about race. They are calling it the White Stripe Project.

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…

“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.”…

…race as a wedge issue can’t be ignored, say the White Stripe organizers. Instead, it should be tackled head on as Republicans embrace culture-war issues like critical race theory and battling the so-called “woke agenda.”

Honestly, I’m not sure this is a terrible idea. I mean, someone was buying all those books by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The Democrats reading those books would probably be very interested in direct appeals to race during the campaign. After all, they’ve been trained that anything less is itself racism. White silence is violence, etc. So, yes this could work with a certain segment of the party who might not otherwise be excited about Joe Biden.

If there’s a downside, it’s that this likely won’t appeal to persuadable voters in the center. Indeed there has been an ongoing argument on the left about this. The counter-argument was summarized pretty well by Bill Maher who said, in essence, Democrats would win every election if they’d stop taking about pregnant men.

The biggest problem with the Democrats is their woke baggage. I think the Democrats could easily win every election if they didn’t do the kind of things that make people go, “Oh my god, this is the party of no common sense.” Stop talking about pregnant men and stuff that makes people go, “Who are these f**king people? What are they talking about? Men don’t get pregnant.” It’s the stuff that makes them very vulnerable because it’s very close to home.

Maher has strayed a bit off the reservation with his complaints about wokeness, but he’s not alone. James Carville has made a similar argument:

CARVILLE: Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.

ILLING: Why not?

CARVILLE: Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.

I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.

One of the people at the forefront of this argument is progressive data analyst David Shor.

There are very real tradeoffs to talking about things that aren’t popular. Obviously, there’s a lot of disagreement about what is popular and what isn’t, and polling is hard. It’s very easy to create polls that make single-payer health care popular or background checks [for gun purchases] popular. But then when these things show up at the ballot box in various ways, they end up losing. The things that liberals want — or that the left wants — some of them are very popular and some aren’t, and I think we have to be honest with ourselves about which is which. And that can be difficult, both from a coalition perspective and emotionally, but the importance of it is very high…

When you look at “defund the police” specifically, there was a real movement among educated, liberal people in the media and among activists across a broad swath of the left to elevate this issue and get folks to talk about it. And there are pros and cons to doing that. I’m not going to claim that I know what the right thing to do is — sometimes, it makes sense to talk about unpopular issues. But we should acknowledge that in practice, those decisions to elevate the salience of certain issues and reduce it on other issues — those decisions are actually something campaigns and activists have a lot of control over. And they are going to end up influencing vote share much more than any decision that any individual campaign makes about what digital vendors they use, or how many digital ads they use versus what TV ads they use.

So I think there are two sides to this. On the one hand, a direct racial appeal to white progressives probably will work. On the other hand, if the direct racial appeal to whites becomes a major news story, which it probably will, you may turn off a lot of people in the center and/or motivate a lot of opposition at the ballot box. In short, if some lefty group creates the next “defund the police” approach, they’ll get winning marks on the far left but it could still really backfire in a general election.