April 15 Open Thread: A Democratic Unity Message That Just Might Work

You know how we tend to argue that Democrats should emphasize either race or class in their appeals to voters? Some political activists believe they’ve found an effective way to talk about racism and class interests that gains support from both people of color and white people.

This January, they canvassed 800 homes, conducting half their conversations with white respondents and half with people of color. Each respondent was shown two flyers. The first used classic dog whistling, taken from a real Republican mailer now circulating in Minnesota. Arguing for more tax cuts, an unnamed candidate describes his opponents as “demanding more sanctuary cities for criminal and illegal aliens.” From there, half the respondents were shown a flyer detailing a progressive populist agenda silent on race – the settled wisdom of the class-left. The other half were shown a race-class narrative that describes how certain politicians use racial division to cleave us from each other in order to gain and hold economic power.

Read the whole thing for the results of their experiment, which appear to bolster the idea that explaining to people that Republicans are manipulating them about race moves the needle better than class appeals alone.

Along those lines, some mainstream Democrats decried Bernie Sanders’ supposed insensitivity in his Jackson, Miss., speech early this month, but this account of his trip tells a much different story.

The shuttering of Backpage.com on sex trafficking charges is in a way the last gasp of what used to be known as the alternative media. Andrew O’Hehir of Salon tells a fascinating backstory of one of the principals, with whom he had a long-ago run-in. Even non-media-employed readers will recognize some of the names from the alt-weeklies of the ’80s who work in mainstream media today.

Art Bell has died. Or has he? Long before “X Files,” Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast AM” filled the wee-hour airwaves with tales of the paranormal and calls from listeners who ate it up.