Biden campaign: About 35% of staff are people of color
Former Vice President Joe Biden released statistics on the diversity of his presidential campaign staff Saturday evening, announcing that 35% of his full-time staff members and 36% of his fulltime senior staff members are people of color.
A majority of Biden’s staff members and senior staff members are women — 53% and 58%, respectively.
Biden’s campaign had, for months, declined to provide such an accounting. The new figures, which were self-reported, came as the Biden campaign was in the midst of a major hiring spree and only hours after Biden had been pressed at a virtual town hall event about having failed to provide such statistics earlier.
Biden has been rapidly expanding his staff across the country since he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in early April, a process that has remade the complexion of both his senior staff and the campaign as a whole.
Biden has faced questions about the lack of racial diversity in the uppermost ranks of his campaign, as his inner circle of most trusted advisers — some of whom have had his ear for decades — skews heavily white. His current and former campaign managers are both white, as are four of the people who have served as deputy campaign manager, his three chiefs of staff as vice president (all still influential), and many of his top communications and policy advisers. The Latino and Asian American political communities have expressed particular concern; Biden has had greater Black representation at the upper levels of his campaign structure.