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Caught Our Eye

Democratic senators and representatives hire significantly more racial minorities than Republicans

Posted by Jenna Ebersole on May 11, 2015

Democrats on the Hill hire significantly more non-white staffers than Republicans in either the House or Senate, LegiStorm data shows.

The split between the parties is particularly pronounced in the House, where 66.5 percent of Democratic staff is Caucasian compared to 93.7 percent of Republican staff. The data is available with LegiStorm's new tool, which allows for filtering Congress by age, gender, party, race and religion in real time.

The House staff race divide closely mirrors the racial divide between members in the House in each party. Republican members are 95.9 percent white, compared to 61.3 percent of Democratic members.

But in the Senate, even though senators from both parties are white by a huge majority, Democratic senators also have more racial diversity in their offices. Democratic members, who are 93.2 percent white, employ staffs that are 79.5 percent white. Republican senators are 94.4 percent white and 93.3 percent of their staff is also white.

Blacks make up the largest minority among staffers in both chambers, at 8.5 percent overall in the House and 6.2 percent overall in the Senate, followed by Hispanics and Asians. 

LegiStorm's race data is based on visual identification and other cues obtained in our research, such as name and languages spoken. Because race identification is not confirmed with individual staffers, the data is most useful in the aggregate and LegiStorm does not identify the race of individual staffers on its site.