The speakers broadly looked like the party — with an obvious exception.
Over the course of the four nights of the Republican convention, there were 93 distinct speakers,84 if we exclude those who offered the opening invocations and who recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Using the run-of-show documents provided to the media, we broke each of those speakers out by race and gender. There’s a lot of information included in those circles and squares but also some demographic categories that are missing. Two speakers, for example, used wheelchairs, including congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn. Ric Grenell, a former administration official, is openly gay, as, perhaps, were others. In other words, there was diversity present that isn’t captured by the graphic above. But it does, nonetheless, capture one dynamic: About half of the speakers were White men. In total,72 of the speakers appeared to be White. (Here, too, things can be blurry, requiring our making assumptions that may be incorrect. If they are, we’ll update this article.) In a population of 93 speakers, though, that’s about what you would expect from a Republican convention. After all, the party itself is about 80 percent white, according to data provided to The Washington Post by Pew Research Center. The density of men relative to women was also about in line with what you would expect.
