> Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters.

Everyone does not agree on that. The period leading to Obama's second term coincides with a period during which white Democrats got significantly more liberal, to the point where they had moved to the left of Black Democrats on race issues: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white.... Part of that was redefining "racism" to mean things other than personal prejudice. Positions that working class Democrats had previously embraced, such as Bernie Sanders' opposition to immigration, became "racist" under the new definitions.

But minorities themselves largely do not accept these theories, and most do not hear the "dog whistles" that white liberals claim to hear: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote... ("We began by asking eligible voters how 'convincing' they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned 'illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs' and called for 'fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.' Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.").

Democrats during that period also rediscovered policies regarding racial preferences in education and hiring that remain wildly unpopular among minorities themselves, not to mention working class white people: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

> Why are you pretending that's not the case?

Because it's self-serving nonsense. Your theory is that folks in Iowa soured on Obama because Republicans pointed out that he was Black, and not because he appointed a former Goldman Sachs executive to Treasury and doubled down on globalization after having run as a populist.

It's also an attitude that is terribly counterproductive for Democrats (but great for Republicans). America is far less "racist" than my native Bangladesh. But some degree of "racism" is inevitable in any society. It's inevitable that working class people are going to have less racially progressive views than elites who learned elaborate social-science theories in college. If it becomes politically acceptable to hold that against them, then that becomes a powerful club for elites to use against the working class. Which is what's happened.

> A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college

That's an interesting social science fact, but you can't build a politics for a working class party around that. The 90% white county where my wife's family is from has a median household income lower than the median for Black households nationally. Folks in that county do not care if you tell them that 2/3s of white people are richer than them, but only 1/2 of Black people. And they correctly perceive that policies that focus on redistributing opportunities based on race--policies that accord more preferences to affluent immigrants from Africa than first generation college students from the Oregon coast--are contrary to their personal interests.