[6] The presidents who campaigned against civil rights and people of color aimed to do more than win votes, Haney López then argued in Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.

[12][13] Haney López drew on his experiences with the AFL–CIO and with the Race-Class Narrative Project to write his 2019 book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America.

[14] Haney López has described Ronald Reagan as "blowing a dog whistle" when the candidate told stories about "Cadillac-driving 'welfare queens' and 'strapping young bucks' buying T-bone steaks with food stamps" while he was campaigning for the presidency.

[15][16][17] He argues that such rhetoric pushes middle-class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest in order to punish "undeserving minorities" who, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense.

According to Haney López, many whites, convinced by powerful economic interests that people of color are the enemy, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but in doing so voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state.

He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has impacted their lives to the policy agendas they support, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top one percent of the population since the 1980s.