Tom Perez says he’s in

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco (4 minute read)

First he said he was thinking about it, then he said he’d do it and now he did it.

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez announced his candidacy for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

He did it in a couple of phone calls yesterday, one to state party chairs and another to the perennially amorphous group called “Latino leaders.” You know who you are if you were invited to the chat. I’ll leave it at that.

It was as much a sell as it was an announcement. NBC reports:

“Perez said the party needs a chair who can ‘speak to every part of the big tent of the Democratic Party … who can speak to that blue-collar voter in Buffalo … and the Dreamer in Las Vegas and the immigrant from Somalia and the other core constituencies of the Democratic Party.’”

Why it’s a big deal

This is an important race with important consequences because with Democrats out of majority leadership in both houses of congress, and with a Republican getting ready to occupy the White House, the chair of the Democratic National Committee is the defacto leader of the party and will decide policy and election priorities.

There are others who seek the Democratic chair. Again NBC:

“Perez joins Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; Jaime Harrison, who heads the South Carolina Democratic Party and Raymond Buckley, leader of the New Hampshire state party in the competition to lead the party after its devastating election loss.”

There’s a divide in the party that the new chair will have to navigate:

A pro-Hillary faction and a pro-Bernie faction who have differing views on how the Democrats should move forward. But so far that doesn’t seem to be as big a challenge as some might think. The Bernie folks like Perez and the Labor Secretary was a Hillary surrogate in the election.

Two things matter. What is his plan and what is his experience? On one, he says he’ll dust-off the Democratic 50-state strategy where there will be operations in every state, not just swing states. And on the other, Perez points to his experience as a community organizer in Maryland where he did extensive grassroots work.

The nuts-and-bolts of the Democratic Party chair election are: there are a few more than 400 electors, and the vote will be held on the weekend of February 23 – 26.

[Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr]