UPDATED: 17 JAN 2024 09:23 AM EST
Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips removed a reference to promoting “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” on his campaign website after one of his top financial backers, a leading DEI opponent, prodded Phillips publicly on the subject.
That donor, the hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, has at different times called Phillips’s language about DEI a “mistake” and said the candidate was “getting educated” on the issue. Writing on X, he said several times that he expected Phillips would revise his campaign website’s reference to DEI.
Earlier this week, the Minnesota representative’s campaign took out the term DEI from the platform section of its website and replaced it with “Equity & Restorative Justice.” The language under the header remains the same, with Phillips’ campaign saying he believes, “We are a rapidly-diversifying country, and it is that diversity, which makes America great.”
But the decision to drop reference to DEI — an decades-old initiative in academia and government to promote fairer representation among groups which have faced historic discrimination — stands out for its timing.
Phillips’s super PAC recently received a commitment for a $1 million donation from Ackman who has engaged in a highly public campaign against DEI initiatives at universities. Ackman recently took part in a conversation on X with Phillips in which the subject was broached.
Ackman previously addressed Phillips’ support for DEI during the afternoon of Sunday, Jan. 14, predicting on X, formerly Twitter, that the candidate would change his tune “once he understands what it is.”
After the initial publication of this article, a Phillips campaign aide provided what they said was a screenshot of the backend of their website showing that they made a change to the platform section at 9:42pm that night.
Minutes later, Ackman posted on X again, saying Phillips was “getting educated as we speak. Let’s listen to what he has to say after he gets educated.”
A cached version of Phillips’ website, as captured by The Wayback Machine, shows that his platform page continued to list DEI as a policy subject as recently as Monday.
By Tuesday, the language had been changed to "Equity & Restorative Justice."
The Phillips campaign defended the change in language in a statement and insisted it had "absolutely not" been made in response to criticism from Ackman or a request from him or his representatives.
“DEI now means such divergent things to different people that it is no longer descriptive. Instead of an academic discussion of a phrase our campaign prefers to focus on the urgent need to address and redress racial disparities — the policy substance of which remains completely unchanged on our site,” Katie Dolan, a Phillips campaign spokesperson, said in a statement shared with POLITICO. “We believe the current accordion drop down button ‘Equity and Restorative Justice’ provides an unambiguous description of the campaign’s goal of an America where all people live in economic security and social dignity.”
In recent days, users on X repeatedly alerted Ackman to the inclusion of DEI language as part of the platform section on Phillips’s campaign site. On Sunday, Ackman replied that he believed Phillips “didn’t understand what DEI was when that was made part of his website. I made the same mistake.”
“He is getting educated as we speak. Let’s listen to what he has to say after he gets educated,” Ackman wrote.
On Tuesday morning, another user on X messaged Ackman about the DEI reference on the Phillips campaign website. Ackman responded that Phillips “didn’t understand DEI until recently” and that he expected “that statement will be revised promptly.”
This piece has been updated to include new information from the Phillips campaign.
