The victory for the Democratic Party in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race on Tuesday was a blow to Elon Musk, who spent $20 million to elect the conservative candidate, and a win for the party’s new political strategy of targeting the “oligarchy.”
People just tuning in to politics for the first time since November could be forgiven for wondering what happened to the Democrats’ obsession with race and racism. For roughly a decade, white supremacy was on the tongue of every Democrat in the land, from bloggers to TV pundits to former President Joe Biden.
“Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” the former president memorably said in June 2021. “Not ISIS, not al Qaeda — white supremacists.”
The scourge of racism, the public was told, was about more than the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. It was an insidious disease that had spread through every organ in American life. And everything needed to be upended to fight it. This included reconsidering whether 2+2=4, decolonizing our bookshelves and school curricula, and mandating implicit bias training for employees across industries and sectors. But above all, fighting racism meant electing Democrats, who had positioned themselves as waging war against the racist Republicans on behalf of “the right side of history.”
But in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decisive victory in November, talk of fighting white supremacists simply vanished. A new villain took their place: “the oligarchy,” embodied by Musk, the richest man on the planet and head of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Of course, there is an obvious reason for the shift — and it has nothing to do with the prevalence of racism, real or imagined. Instead, it has everything to do with politics. Whipping up fear over white supremacy is no longer an effective political tactic, and so Democrats moved on to a different bogeyman. They rode the racism horse as far as it could take them. And once it could no longer gallop, Democrats left it for dead.
More consequential than the reality of losing to Trump, the man they’d spent nine years calling a racist, was how they lost. According to AP VoteCast, Trump’s share of nonwhite voters increased dramatically in 2024, improving with Hispanic and black voters by 8% each and Asian voters by 5%. A Northwestern University poll found that Trump won the Native American vote with 51%, up from 40% in 2020.
To be sure, if Trump had won as a result of a historic white voter turnout, the white supremacy angle would still have political legs. But Trump’s victory being directly attributable to nonwhite voters moving meaningfully in his direction ensured its demise. Meanwhile, the only demographic that showed movement toward the Democratic nominee from 2020 to 2024 was white college graduates. The reality that Democrats’ race-baiting had backfired was so evident that they couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.
Framing the fight as between themselves and the “oligarchy” is likely to yield better electoral results than racial politics — Tuesday’s results show it already has. Maintaining the canard that the increasingly diverse Republican Party represented “white supremacy” was simply untenable.
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But that’s not to say the new strategy is a slam dunk. To be truly effective, Democrats would have to become the party of the working class again. That means putting forward policies that appeal to working-class Americans and embody their values. It’s difficult to imagine the Democratic Party being embraced en masse by the people it just spent a decade ridiculing as racists and xenophobes. It’s also easy to imagine the party’s current base, college-educated white people, being turned off by attempts to moderate on cultural issues.
It’s a problem of their own making. Democrats would be better off building a platform that solves real problems for real people than relying on imaginary bogeymen to rally their voters.
