Latino. He emphasizes the importance of
diversity in communicating these positions
to the communities they impact most.
“Hopefully, the signal that it sends to leaders in constituencies as well as folks in their
individual communities is that this is a
campaign that’s interested in having their
voices heard.”
BARACK OBAMA
JOE ROSPARS
New Media Director
ERTHARIN COUSIN
Special Adviser
MATTHEW NUGEN
Political Director
color. Romney’s 24-member team includes two
people of color: Filipino American Cesar
Conda, and the Cuban-born Alex Castellanos.
By comparison, The 2007 DiversityInc Top
50 Companies for Diversity average 34 percent
people of color in the work force, with new
hires averaging 42 percent people of color.
National work-force representation of people
of color is 29 percent, according to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics.
“[Diversity] allows for the broadest possible
elements of perspective and an understanding of
how that impacts issues—who is impacted, what
the community’s perspective is—and providing a
framework within which the senator can make
determinations about his statements,” says
Biden’s campaign manager, Luis Navarro, who is
RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY
In the June 2006 issue of DiversityInc, we
examined the racial/ethnic diversity of the
staffs of U.S. senators and found that many
did not represent the demographics of their
constituencies or the U.S. population. We
are the only publication that has examined
the racial/ethnic diversity of the major presidential candidates’ staffs. We have made
this process completely bipartisan and
objective—each of the eight candidates
(who were either announced or about to
announce when we embarked on this project in February) received equal attention
throughout our research process.
In February, we sent each candidate a
package containing an introductory letter
requesting the racial/ethnic breakdowns of
their campaign staffs. All packages sent via DHL
ground services were signed for by members of
each candidates’ campaign staff, according to
tracking receipts.
Over the next four months, DiversityInc
staff followed up repeatedly with these eight
candidates via e-mail, fax and phone to
retrieve this information. We invited each
candidate to submit the racial/ethnic demographics for as many staff members as they
wanted to include. Ultimately, all five
Democrats complied with this request; all
three Republican candidates refused.
We used George Washington University’s
database on campaign hires to retrieve names of
each candidates’ staffers and Google searches to
make a preliminary determination on each
