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Democrats are worried that they have a problem: The three people leading polls in the very early stages of their presidential race are all white men.

The party traditionally battles over identity politics and wants to be seen as promoting diversity.

Its last three nominees have been Barack Obama, who became the nation’s first African-American president, and Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win the popular vote.

Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) are this year’s top-tier candidates, according to a recent and very early Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll.

It showed that 32 percent of those polled in Iowa favored Biden, while 19 percent preferred Sanders and 11 percent liked O’Rourke.

While some Democrats believe the early polls are merely a metric on name recognition, they say it defies the party’s mission to be more diverse and more inclusive that the top three candidates are all white men.

“It’s almost like we’re moving backwards,” said one Democratic strategist. “We elected a black president in 2008 and 2012, we nominated a woman in 2016, so why are we now back with three white men at the top of the polls?”

Democratic strategist Seth Bringman added that it “definitely sends the wrong message about who our party is.”

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