The 2022 Democratic primaries have seen a surge of white billionaires, ostensibly Democrats, throwing their weight – and their money – around to try to boost the fortunes of hand-picked, under-qualified white men running against candidates of color. They are doing this despite the candidates of color often being more experienced and better suited to both win and govern in a period of fractious racial conflict where democracy itself is under ferocious attack. With white billionaire friends like these, progressives and Democrats are likely to lose political power and also set back the cause of racial justice in this country.

Not only is it a bad look and a continuation of institutional racism in a party that is nearly half people of color, but, most immediately, it’s bad electoral politics. Most of these billionaires and billionaire-backed politicians are weaker candidates than the person of color they are trying to block.

In Oregon’s sixth congressional district primary, two white billionaire-backed Super Pacs spent more than $11m trying to help Carrick Flynn, an inexperienced white academic from Georgetown who was running against Andrea Salinas, a far more experienced Latina state legislator, in the most heavily Latino district in Oregon (Salinas survived the onslaught and won the contest in May). In Pennsylvania, another Super Pac flush with millions of dollars from white billionaires spent $3m trying to defeat Summer Lee, a progressive Black female state legislator (Lee managed to withstand the attacks, defeating her opponent by a scant 978 votes).

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, lifelong Republican Rick Caruso switched his party registration to Democrat just this past January and proceeded to dump $37m into the race trying to defeat Karen Bass, an African American congresswoman and longtime community-based leader. There are few people with more experience and expertise than Bass when it comes to addressing the challenges facing Los Angeles. Bass defeated Caruso by seven points in the June primary election, but has to square off against him again in November in what will now be a needlessly expensive and wasteful contest.

As problematic as the above examples are, the situation in the Wisconsin US Senate race threatens the prospects of progressive people across the country.

The imperative of expanding the Democratic majority in the Senate is one of the most urgent needs of this moment. Whether it’s codifying Roe v Wade, passing a new Voting Rights Act, expanding the supreme court so it reflects and protects the interest of the people, or advancing any one of several other desperately needed justice and equality measures, Democrats must increase their numbers in the Senate so that they can jettison the filibuster and pass these critical policies.

To do that, they must flip as many Republican-held seats as possible, and one of the best opportunities for such a pick-up is in Wisconsin where the Republican Ron Johnson is up for re-election in a state where Democrats have won most of the statewide elections in the past four years.

The lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, is an inspiring young progressive African American with both a track record and enormous political potential that is reflected in the latest polling. Mandela’s path is being blocked, however, by Alex Lasry, the son of Marc Lasry, the billionaire who owns the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team (In full disclosure, I have contributed to Mandela and all the Black candidates mentioned in this column, and I have backed many Black candidates for the past 20 years: like the actress Issa Rae, I tend to root for everybody Black).

The junior Lasry has never held elected office and didn’t even live in the state until his father bought the basketball team eight years ago. The elder Lasry has contributed significantly to the Democratic party, spending $500,000 to support Barack Obama (and, coincidentally or not, his son subsequently got a job working in the Obama White House). A third candidate in Wisconsin, the state treasurer, Sarah Godlewski, is also running and also dipping into her multimillion-dollar fortune to fuel her bid, but at least she has won office previously and served in public office.

By any objective measure, Lasry is a weaker candidate than Mandela. Lasry has no electoral track record, and has never received a single vote in a Wisconsin election, while Mandela has been elected to the state legislature, and, most important to this year’s contest, he won statewide office four years ago in the race for lieutenant governor. Digging deeper into the latest polling data shows that Mandela is a far stronger candidate than Lasry in a general election bid to oust the incumbent Johnson.

Biden’s 2020 win in Wisconsin confirmed the formula necessary for victory in that state. It is the same formula that Obama used to twice win Wisconsin and the White House – turn out large numbers of people of color, garner overwhelming support of those voters of color, and also secure a meaningful minority of the white vote. Biden won the support of 92% of Black voters, 60% of Latinos, and 46% of whites.

In the June poll released by Marquette Law School testing each candidate’s strength against Johnson, Barnes hits or approaches those benchmarks, while Lasry falls far short of the numbers needed to win.

In addition to the current state of play, the highest upside in the electorate for Democrats is with Black voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic yet tend to vote at lower levels. In 2020, Black turnout was 34% lower lower than whites, meaning that 250,000 eligible people of color didn’t cast ballots. In what will likely be a close contest, that is a very sizable pool of people, almost all of whom would vote for the Democrat if inspired by a candidate who has lived the Black experience.

Some white billionaires can and do play constructive roles in the struggle for social change. The Georgia businessman Arthur Blank and California philanthropist Patty Quillin contributed to the millions of dollars that went to helping elect King’s successor, the Rev Raphael Warnock, to the US Senate in 2021. Far from trying to defeat candidates of color, Mackenzie Scott has moved billions of dollars to organizations run by people of color.

I do not believe that Democratic billionaires set out to intentionally target candidates of color, but that is what is happening, and their actions are dividing the progressive movement and imperiling the prospects of defending democracy from an unrelenting rightwing onslaught working to make America white again. Rather than fund electoral ego trips and weak candidacies, they should be pouring those many millions of dollars into civic engagement groups doing the work of turning out the voters necessary to win in November. Democracy is at stake. Justice and equality are at stake. Progressives need to be smart and data-driven in rallying behind the candidates with the best chance to oust Republican incumbents. And it wouldn’t hurt to not be racist in the process.

• Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. He is a Guardian US columnist