President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Hertz Arena on October 31, 2018. Joe Raedle | Getty Images

WASHINGTON – Fighting to preserve the all-Republican government, President Trump and his party have wielded a closing election message of fear. But the upstairs-downstairs split within the Republican coalition requires more than hype about imagined threats of "invasion" from a bedraggled immigrant caravan. GOP strategy involves two distinctly different kinds of fear. For the party's base of conservative white voters – especially older, less-educated ones in small-towns and rural areas – it's fear for their personal safety. So Trump and his allies warn baselessly that impoverished Central American immigrants may bring crime, terrorism and exotic diseases into the U.S. The crudest expression is the nakedly racist video Trump tweeted this week linking Democrats with a chortling Latino murderer. But Republicans aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan deploy less-raw versions of the same idea against various Democratic candidates, portraying an ex-CIA agent as a teacher of Islamic jihadis, a black Rhodes scholar as a frightening hoodie-clad rapper and an Ohio county official of Indian-Tibetan descent as linked to Libyan terrorism.

But race-based messages aimed at working-class Republicans can backfire with better-educated, higher-income voters and donors more comfortable with America's growing diversity. Throughout the Trump presidency, Republicans have hemorrhaged support from white college graduates, especially women. For those voters, Republican leaders highlight fear for their pocketbooks. That means warnings of Democratic tax increases and, more ominously, seizure of private property from the rich. Last month, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report highlighting "The Opportunity Costs of Socialism." Invoking Lenin's Russia, Mao's China and Castro's Cuba, it likened Democratic criticism of the gap between rich and poor to Marxism. The twin assertion of cultural and economic threats makes an oddly dystopian message for a time of strong economic growth. With America's recovery from recession and financial crisis in its ninth year, Friday's strong employment report showed rising wages and labor force participation in addition to 250,000 new jobs. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan fashioned similar data into an upbeat "Morning in America" re-election campaign. But 21st century Republicans have not, for reasons that go beyond Trump's truculent personality. The continuing march of income inequality undercuts broad appeals to prosperity. Candidate Trump recognized the issue's potency with his vow to eliminate special tax breaks for the rich, such as "carried interest" for financial executives that he accused of "getting away with murder." During the Obama presidency, such proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy terrified Wall Street. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939," Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman complained in 2010. But with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, Schwarzman had little to fear. The Trump/GOP tax cut did not eliminate carried interest. It delivered the greatest benefits to the wealthy.