Democratic group urges more investment to catch up to Republicans in building campaign talent pipelines

A new report commissioned by a Democratic “pipeline-building” organization is urging the party to put more money and effort into such efforts to counter Republican groups that work to train staff and increase diversity ahead of the 2024 election.

Pipeline-building groups recruit and train staff for campaigns up and down the ballot, with the goal of building talent that will work future campaigns after working their way up from the bottom.

“It takes great candidates to win elections, but great candidates can’t win elections on their own,” said Lauren Baer, the managing partner of Arena, the group that commissioned the study.

“In particular, they need qualified, well trained teams around them, and teams that represent the diversity of the places that they’re running, and the diversity of the Democratic voting base," Baer said.

But the report for Arena carried out by Dalberg Advisors argued that“the Democratic talent pipeline is neither as robust nor as diverse as it needs to be in order to consistently win campaigns and govern effectively,” she added.

Matt Frazier, a partner at Dalberg Advisors, told donors at a presentation about the report on Wednesday that one thing that surprised them about the report's findings was that, going in, they had "a hypothesis or assumption that the explicit focus on diversity, especially when it comes to racial diversity, is something where the Democrats have a natural advantage."

“And we heard very clearly that that is something that Republicans are taking very seriously. And a lot of their pipeline efforts are working very hard to try to close that gap.”

The report also arguedthat Democratic pipeline-building organizations are underfunded.

Specifically, the report said, “Our analysis