Conventional wisdom on the liberal left holds that bias among voters is so prevalent that it creates a disadvantage at the polls for women and people of color running for office. The numbers, however, beg to differ. In “The Electability Myth,” a new study of the 2018 US election, the Reflective Democracy Campaign (RDC) has found that other groups have a slight advantage over white men among the voters — and systematic disadvantages that have historically kept them off the ballot.

Click here for the study (with some very nice graphs), and click here for a succinct interview with Brenda Choresi Carter, who directs the RDC. There, Carter explains why the majority of officeholders are still white men:

When voters go into the voting booth to vote, they are presented with a ballot that is the result of a long and usually invisible process of selection and support. There are pretty high barriers to entry into politics for everyone, but women and people of color face even higher ones. And, in particular, the problem of political gatekeepers is one that I think even engaged voters often don’t understand, because it’s so invisible.