Here’s more from the Demos authors:

Building support among whites does not require that those focusing on the concerns of minority constituencies take a back seat in the Democratic coalition in the name of winning more votes. At the same time, we found that the Democratic base, which is disproportionately people of color, responds enthusiastically to messages that name fearmongering politicians and insist on common cause across color lines. A strategy that treats race and class separately implies a tenuous coalition of convenience between constituencies that care about different issues. The race-class fusion, in contrast, shows how racial and economic justice are fundamentally intertwined. [snip] Except for a die-hard group that stands at just 18 percent of the national sample, even those who hold reactionary racial views recognize that deliberate division is destructive. An honest conversation with voters about how the right has weaponized racial fear to build support for plutocracy can create a new progressive majority, a coalition of economic populists and racial-justice advocates who recognize that economic and racial justice will be won together.

One phrase sums up perfectly what Trump and his fellow right-wing Republicans are doing: they’ve “weaponized racial fear to build support for plutocracy.” On that front, let’s look at things that happened just this week. Conservatives have used the awful, tragic murder of Mollie Tibbetts—the man who was arrested is apparently undocumented, although his lawyer has said he is not—as the latest in their campaign to scare Americans about Mexican immigrants and Latinos in general.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Newt Gingrich admitting what his party is doing: “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly.” The GOP needed this story badly this week in order to keep their followers in line, in particular after the news broke about Michael Cohen’s admission under oath that Trump committed a crime, and about Paul Manafort’s convictions on multiple counts. There are apparently no limits to Republican cynicism. Members of Mollie Tibbetts’ family condemned Republicans for using her death to race-bait for political gain. Here’s one example from Twitter:

x hey iÃ¢ÂÂm a member of mollieÃ¢ÂÂs family and we are not so fucking small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals. now stop being a fucking snake and using my cousins death as political propaganda. take her name out of your mouth. https://t.co/xxZNBF0Uv9 — sam (@samlucasss) August 22, 2018

Of course, actual data and research shows that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the native-born, and that you are safer living in an area with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants. Facts and truth play no part in the development of policy for Trump Republicans. Ms. Tibbetts and her grieving family simply serve as pawns in their fear-mongering strategy.

Then, later in the week, we got more race-related bullshit from the Twitler-in-chief:

x I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. Ã¢ÂÂSouth African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.Ã¢ÂÂ @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

What’s this about? Well, it’s a white supremacist lie that our friend Tucker Carlson over at Fox News helped to mainstream by bleating about it on his show. Mr. 46 Percent of the Popular Vote gets all his information from Fox News, so that’s where this came from. David Duke and other neo-Nazis expressed gratitude to Trump for publicizing their lie. The truth is that, thankfully, murders of farmers in South Africa are at a 20-year low, less than one-third the peak level in 1998. Like his comments about Charlottesville, the repeated attacks on NFL players, and countless other incidents, this is another example of Trump race-baiting and cozying up to white nationalists and white supremacists.

Trump, Republicans, and right-wing media are screaming: “Look over there!” and weaponizing racial fear. They certainly don’t want voters to look at what’s going on with Trump/Cohen/Manafort and, most recently, tabloid king and former Trump protector David Pecker of the National Enquirer—who has recently been given immunity by special counsel Robert Mueller to tell what he knows about Trump’s illicit affairs and illegal payments to cover them up.

More broadly, Trump & Co. need to take voters’ attention away from the few policies they actually have enacted since taking control in Washington, DC. The biggest of these by far is the GOP’s tax cuts for the rich, which have become more unpopular as voters realize what a scam it is. The Trump scheme borrows money from our future to send billions of dollars to the top 1 percent, and then serves as an excuse to call for cutting Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and other vital programs to pay for those tax cuts—which, you may remember, were supposed to pay for themselves, according to the White House. That’s the Republican playbook, and it’s the one they’ve been relying on since long before Mr. Popular Vote Loser stumbled his way into the Oval Office.

The Demos research and its results offer Democrats an inspiring message, one that can allow progressives to productively move beyond the debate about “identity politics” and how to discuss race and class. Almost no Democrat of any stature says we should talk about “class, not race,” and almost none advocates talking about “race, not class.” Republicans, however, are the ones who have long weaponized identity politics and racial fear, who have practiced the dark art of “strategic racism” to ensure that power and wealth remains where they believe it belongs: in the hands of people like Donald Trump.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).

PS-You can watch me push back on conservatives’ politicization of the murder of Mollie Tibbetts below: