But dog whistling is also a class weapon. From its inception, dog whistling included an effort to undermine not just the New Deal coalition but some of its core commitments — the premise that government should serve working families by redistributing wealth downward, while ensuring that the marketplace provided a reasonable chance of upward mobility. By fostering racial division, the Republican Party sought to break popular support for government policies that taxed the wealthy and favored workers over bosses.

Our research shows that highlighting the class agenda behind the constant racial provocations provides the best antidote to dog whistling.

Listen to this message:

Certain politicians and their greedy lobbyists hurt everyone by handing kickbacks to the rich, defunding our schools, and threatening seniors with cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Then they turn around and point the finger for hard times at poor families, Black people, and new immigrants. When we reject their scapegoating and come together across racial differences, we can make this a nation we’re proud to leave all of our kids — whether we’re white, Black, or brown, from down the street or across the globe.

In our national poll, we tested nine different versions of this race-fused-to-class message. No surprise, the progressive base, which we measured as 23 percent of the national sample, preferred all nine race-class messages to the racial fear message. But so, too, did the almost three in five voters who fell into the “persuadable” camp. This is the cohort Democrats must carry in big numbers to win elections. And this group found all of the race-class messages more convincing than the racial fear frame.

Is “persuadable” simply shorthand for white working-class voters here, in a way that just makes this one more strategy for winning back those voters? The Democrats have a sorry history of seeking to persuade white swing voters by adopting approaches that disregard communities of color.

It is certainly true that the race-class fusion seeks to appeal to a broad segment of white voters. By merging the issues of racism and economic inequality, this approach reframes racism away from a conflict between warring groups and presents it as a tool of division wielded to divide and distract us. Doing so opens up space to add more whites to the Democratic coalition.

It says to white voters that they are not the enemy, but are instead important allies against the true threat, the powerful elites who sow division for their own profit. This is a “we are the 99 percent” message. But it is expressly race-conscious, stressing that racism is the principal weapon used against most of us and emphasizing that whites, too, stand to benefit as members of a multiracial coalition.

The merged race-class approach does not sacrifice people of color on the altar of the white working class. On the contrary, our research shows that the race-class message resonates within communities of color. It identifies the importance of economic reform and it lifts up the possibility of nurturing a broad multiracial alliance that can push to get government back onto the side of working families.