I'm Jonathan K. Parton, welcome to K-PART.

Conventional Wisdom and a healthy helping of gerrymandering says the upcoming midterm elections

are supposed to be a boon for Republicans.

The Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has upended that conventional wisdom, but

my guest argues that that conventional wisdom ignores a major factor, race.

See Phillips first came to the podcast in 2018 with his New York Times bestselling book,

Brown is the new white, how the demographic revolution has created a new American majority.

Today he is out with a new book, How We Win the Civil War, securing a multi-racial democracy

and ending white supremacy for good.

As Phillips explains in this conversation first recorded for Washington Post Live on September

26th, the Confederates never stopped fighting, and Phillips explains what progressives need

to do to win that fight.

Before we dive deep into the book, let's just start at the 35,000-foot level.

You argue that race is more central to politics today than ever before, why?

So the country is going to go on a demographic revolution in that the country used to be

12% people of color in 1965 and is 40% today.

So that has revolutionary implications for how politics is conducted, for electoral outcomes,

for electoral strategy and results.

Historically politics in this country has been a contest among white people, and so you

had liberal whites competing with conservative whites to try to get the whites in the middle.

And that's how politics functioned for centuries.

And up until 65, and the voting rights act was passed in the immigration reform act was

...