Research on the political consequences of economic disruption has emphasized voter

backlash against globalization and elite appeals to majoritarian anxieties. Yet we identify a

complementary supply-side strategy in which policymakers blame outgroups—such as

immigrants—specifically to appeal to minority voters rather than to white majorities. We

argue that outgroup-blaming rhetoric can be used to court ideologically or economically

conservative segments of minority constituencies, especially in places experiencing eco-

nomic distress, and that this strategy is most likely when economic shocks erode partisan

loyalty and when elites face competitive pressures that reward symbolic signaling over

policy delivery. We evaluate this argument by analyzing more than three million tweets

from all sitting members of the U.S. Congress between 2013 and 2020, using supervised

machine learning and Large language models (LLMs) to classify messages that blame

immigrants, foreign governments, or international institutions, and examining how their

frequency varies by ideology, party, and district or state demographics. To assess the causal

effect of economic decline, we exploit a Bartik-style instrument that isolates the exogenous

component of manufacturing job losses at the district and state level, disaggregated by

race. The paper contributes to research on elite behavior, economic voting, and race and

representation by demonstrating how economic shocks shape rhetorical strategies and

complicate assumptions about the racial logic of anti-globalization politics.