All seven senators running for president have Capitol Hill staffs more racially diverse than the states they represent, and only two of them employ a smaller share of white people than the Democratic electorate they're seeking to win over.
The demographics of their offices, and those of all 40 of their colleagues in the Democratic Caucus, were revealed last week in the most recent edition of a report the Senate leadership has been commissioning over the past dozen years in an effort to promote more gender, ethnic and sexual identity diversity on that side of the Capitol.
Getting more people from different backgrounds and experiences to work (and have internships) on Capitol Hill has become an increasingly emphatic goal of those seeking to improve not only the functionality but also the public's perception of the legislative branch.
And in the opening stages of the 2020 presidential campaign, when the Democratic Party will be counting on increased turnout among minority voters, party leaders have been talking up their commitment to diversity with renewed intensity.
Kamala Harris of California has the Senate personal office staff with the highest share of non-white workers, at 70 percent. The only other black candidate in the Democratic field, Cory Booker of New Jersey, is No 3. with 61 percent staff of color. (In between is Hawaii's Brian Schatz.)
Bernie Sanders (28 percent) and Amy Klobuchar (38 percent) have the least diverse collections of aides among the Senate's current White House aspirants, but his Vermont and her Minnesota are also the whitest of the seven states represented by the contenders.
And both Sanders and Klobuchar increased the overall diversity of their staff in recent years, to the point that they are overrepresented by black people, Latinos and Asians on their payrolls compared to the demographics of their states.
Still, they are the two with groups of employees whiter than the Democratic Party. According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on boosting African-Americans' socioeconomic status and civic engagement, 41 percent of registered Democrats identify as people of color.
By that measure, Michael Bennet of Colorado (at 42 percent) and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (46 percent) have come closest to assembling staffs that mirror the overall racial diversity of their party.
But Gillibrand has seen the number of black people on her staff drop in half over the past two years — to 11 percent of the roster (including her chief of staff, however) while they account for one in five members of the party nationwide.
The staffs of Klobuchar, Sanders and Bennet have smaller percentages of black people than the party overall, but in all three cases the percentages are higher than the black share of their states' populations.
Almost a quarter of Elizabeth Warren's staff is black, a much higher percentage than all the others except Booker and Harris.
At the same time, however, at a time when one in eight Democrats nationally identifies as Hispanic, Warren and Klobuchar are then only senators in the field with a smaller share of Latinos on their staffs than 12 percent. (The Minnesotan's staff is 4 percent Latino, half what it was two years ago.)
While his staff is the Senate's third most diverse, Booker is the only one of the seven with a staff that does not have a strong overrepresentation of Asian-Americans. (English-speaking members of this group are 3 percent of registered Democrats, the Pew Research Center says.)
The raw numbers for each office were not revealed in the study, and the number of staffers each senator may employ in these "personal" offices — not the aides they hire for committees or leadership jobs — varies considerably based on their number of constituents. Harris, for example, gets to hire many more people to serve California than Sanders gets to handle the needs of Vermont.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.