A former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer said Thursday that Beto O’Rourke will find it difficult to win the Democratic primary because Democrats want to vote for someone other than a “white guy.”
“We have the most exciting, diverse field of candidates right now,” Jess McIntosh, who served as the director of communications outreach on the Clinton campaign, told CNN Thursday. “And he has rightfully acknowledged that there might be a little bit of a misstep with him being a white guy, and maybe that’s not the face of the new Democratic Party.”
McIntosh did say, however, that O’Rourke at least acknowledges that being a white male is an obstacle to overcome for a Democrat. He noted that Bernie Sanders, for example, has argued that experience and judgment should count more than race and gender.
“The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” O’Rourke said in the Vanity Fair profile published Wednesday. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. It’s the only way I know to meet that challenge.”
“But I totally understand people who will make a decision based on the fact that almost every single one of our presidents has been a white man, and they want something different for this country,” he said. “And I think that’s a very legitimate basis upon which to make a decision. Especially in the fact that there are some really great candidates out there right now.”
As of mid-March, Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden are leading the polls among Democrats, and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., the nation’s second black woman in the Senate, is in a distant third place, according to the latest Real Clear Politics average.
