Study: Democrats pay black campaign staff 30 percent less than their white coworkers

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last updated 8 January 2015

A study from the New Organizing Institute, a left-wing nonprofit that offers campaign training and consulting, reports that while Democratic campaigns are more likely to hire minorities than their Republican counterparts, they also pay minority staffers significantly less.

"Republican campaigns have more pronounced disparities both in gender and racial/ethnic representation among campaign staff," the study says, but "African-American staffers on Democratic federal-level campaigns are paid 70 cents on the dollar compared to their white counterparts; Hispanics are paid 68 cents on the dollar. Women on campaigns are also paid less than men... 95 cents on the dollar." Income disparities were less pronounced on GOP campaigns.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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