DNC Chairman Tom Perez
On February 25th, Tom Perez won the 2017 Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship election. Perez, the former Secretary of Labor under President Obama, defeated Keith Ellison, U.S. Representative for the 5th congressional district of Minnesota, by a vote of 235–200.
Perez then nominated Ellison to become Deputy Chairman, a unanimously confirmed voice motion at the downtown Atlanta election. Further seeking party solidarity, Ellison implored the room, “if you’re wearing a ‘Keith’ t-shirt — or any t-shirt — I am asking you to give everything you’ve got to support chairman Perez.”
The contested DNC chair election, the first since 1985, became necessary after an unfortunate course of events which coincided with the 2016 presidential election. Former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned under fire in July after thousands of her exposed emails, stemming from the Wikileaks DNC email leaks, suggested a coordination with the Clinton campaign. And after assuming the DNC chairwoman position on an interim basis, Donna Brazile was then accused of passing a CNN debate question to the Clinton campaign prior to a primary debate, again via Wikileaks.
Perez, the first Latino leader of the party, was viewed as the establishment candidate. Meanwhile, Ellison garnered support from liberal activists, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Following former V.P. Joe Biden’s endorsement of Perez, Sanders questioned the direction of the party by asking, “Do we stay with a failed status-quo approach or do we go forward with a fundamental restructuring of the Democratic Party?”
Chairman Perez is now tasked with rebuilding the Democratic Party at a time when the Republican Party controls the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives in addition to almost assuredly being able to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with its nominee, Neil Gorsuch, having a nuclear button to push if need be, which would re-establish a conservative majority on the high court. Moreover, the Republican Party now controls both the governorship and legislature in 24 states whereas the Democratic Party does so in just five.
After surrendering hundreds of state seats throughout the past eight years, the Democratic Party finds itself at its weakest position since the 1920s. As the party has now gained more votes in six of the past seven presidential elections, some democratic leaders partly blame the republican’s dominant House position on poor democratic turnout in mid-term elections. Yet others point the finger at 2010 republican gerrymandering, the process of manipulatively redrawing district lines to favor one party.
In order to combat these losses, former Attorney General Eric Holder will chair the recently-formed National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The not-for-profit organization will also include the efforts of former President Barack Obama to improve the party’s national representation by producing fairer district maps. Holder, who contends that gerrymandering is the biggest rigged system in America, has stated, “the notion that people are denied their ability to cast a meaningful vote…is inconsistent with who we say we are.” Part of Holder and Obama’s stated mission is to correct what they perceive as the current mistake of the Democratic Party and Progressive Movement, that being an over-emphasis of the federal level, by implementing more bottoms-up strategies. Finally, Holder has foreshadowed legal battles to counteract discriminatory voting restrictions, having called the decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to drop a legal dispute over Texas’ strict voter ID law “disheartening”.
