If Democrats Want to Win, They Have to Drain the Swamp

I’ve given that bias a name: Straight White American Male Preference, or SWAMP. It dilutes Democratic strategy, misdirects hundreds of millions of dollars, and starves the constituencies most likely to produce a majority. My organization, Democracy in Color, has just completed a comprehensive SWAMP audit of the Democratic Party, and the findings are alarming.

It follows in the tradition of the Fannie Lou Hamer Report, the first independent audit of Democratic Party spending, which my late wife, Susan Sandler, Julie Martinez Ortega, and I published in 2014. That report found that, of the $514 million the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC paid to consultants, just 1.7 percent went to firms owned by people of color. Twelve years later, the leadership and the consultant corps have barely changed—and what flows from that is more urgent still: roughly a billion dollars misallocated by preference rather than by data, based on the spending patterns of the most recent election cycles. A SWAMP audit, a tool I developed while writing my latest book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, measures the racial and gender preference an institution is showing.

It rests on a single number: Straight white men are 29 percent of the US population and 29 percent of the electorate. Where white men hold not 29 percent of the power but 67, 89, or 100 percent, only two explanations are available. Either white men are smarter and more deserving than everybody else, or preference is doing the work.

Nearly half of all Democratic voters are people of color. But 100 percent of the top leadership of the party’s principal campaign committees and allied super PACs is white, and 67 percent of those leaders are white men—more than double their share of the country. If expertise about your target constituencies matters—and it does—that absence of cultural insight and a track record is a strategic liability, not merely an equity problem.

This tracks with how power is allocated everywhere in this country, and it reflects the widespread, rarely stated, emotionally uncomfortable assumption that white men are in fact smarter than everyone else. Isabel Wilkerson identified this reality in her book Caste, describing America as a long-running drama in which for generations, everyone has known who is center stage in the lead. It is a truism of behavioral science that people tend to like people like themselves, so it should be no surprise that monochromatic Party leaders turn to other whites, and to white men, in grossly disproportionate numbers.

Our analysis of the FEC filings by the top Democratic Party committees found that of the $155 million paid this cycle to the consultants among the party’s top 100 vendors, 89 percent went to firms run by white people, and 57 percent of those firms are run by white men. This is not about abstract racial and gender bean-counting. It’s about winning elections, retaking control of Congress, and stopping the march of authoritarianism in America. White men are 29 percent of the population and accounted for just 26 percent of the Democratic coalition that won in 2020. In other words, nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters are not white men.