Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., winks as she jokes with other senators on the Senate Banking Committee ahead of a hearing on the nomination of Marvin Goodfriend to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Politico reports that the Warren campaign in Nevada is in disarray. I know that, given Warren’s record of competence, this is a shock, but it is true.

A half-dozen women of color have departed Elizabeth Warren’s Nevada campaign in the run-up to the state’s caucuses with complaints of a toxic work environment in which minorities felt tokenized and senior leadership was at loggerheads.

The six staffers have left the roughly 70-person Nevada team since November, during a critical stretch of the race. Three of them said they felt marginalized by the campaign, a situation they said didn’t change or worsened after they took their concerns to their superiors or to human resources staff.
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Another recently departed staffer, also a field organizer, granted anonymity because she feared reprisal, echoed that sentiment. “I felt like a problem — like I was there to literally bring color into the space but not the knowledge and voice that comes with it,” she said in an interview.

She added: “We all were routinely silenced and not given a meaningful chance on the campaign. Complaints, comments, advice, and grievances were met with an earnest shake of the head and progressive buzzwords but not much else.” A third former field organizer who was also granted anonymity said those descriptions matched her own experience.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Elizabeth Warren, the woman who lied about her race to further her career, quite possibly on the backs of more qualified white women who chose not to lie about their race, would hire minority staffers in order to create an image. I mean if you are really outraged that Warren used you as a token for the photo ops, you may not be bright enough to be allowed outside without a chaperone.

The story doesn’t give us much to go from in way of age, education, or campaign experience of the staffers but if you have that nagging feeling that you’re a token hired to give the correct percentages to the staff, you need to consider that the rest of the team has the same idea.

As a rule, campaigns are high-stress environments where not only is the staff trying to build up the candidate, they are doing so with an eye on what job they want to have the day after election day. That environment is not a terribly nurturing one. So being shunted aside and ignored and having your ideas either stolen or laughed at isn’t all that unusual. If you’re coming in with minimal experience and no internal patron and you are not taken seriously because of the whole token thing, it will be much worse.

And lastly, there is always the possibility that the people punching out just weren’t that good and they were marginalized because of lack of experience or ability rather than because of their race or gender. Shocking concept, I know, but melanin and genitalia do not impart either experience or competence.

Regardless, this is schadenfreude with a side order of bacon. It is delicious. The one candidate who lied and schemed her way to the US Senate based on manipulating artificial racial quotas is being dragged down by people she apparently hired to create a bogus racial makeup of her field staff.