Dean Phillips drops DEI from campaign website

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, publicly called Phillips’ use of that language a mistake.

The Minnesota representative’s campaign has taken 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 hedge funder Bill 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.

“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.”

A cached version of Phillips’ website, as captured by The Wayback Machine, shows that his platform page listed DEI as recently as Monday. By Tuesday, it had been changed to "Equity & Restorative Justice."