Newly elected Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Tom Perez didn’t receive the cheers he expected on his “Come Together Fight Back” tour stop in Portland, Maine.
“Regardless of why you showed up today, you showed up for a reason. Something compelled you to find the space and time to be here, and I want you to ask yourself what that reason is,” Claire Cummings, the leader of the Maine Young Democrats, told the boisterous crowd.
“Maybe it’s because you love a certain senator from Vermont,” Cummings said, in reference to Sen. Bernie Sanders. The crowd exploded with cheers, and they even began chanting Bernie Sanders name.
“Maybe you came though because you’re curious about the new DNC chairman and the future of the Democratic party,” Cummings said, taking dead aim at Tom Perez.
This time, the crowd began to boo with just a few cheers scattered across the crowd. This is a horrible look for the DNC, especially while they are on a “unity” tour trying to “bring people back together.”
Tom Perez is the former labor secretary that served under Obama, but he is labeled as “establishment.” He represents a faction of the government many are rejecting going forward, including Sen. Sanders.
Perez beat out Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison — a left-wing Bernie Sanders ally — in February to become the third DNC chair in the last year.
The Democratic party currently has two factions vying for power: the moderate, pro-Hillary Clinton Democrats and the left-wing, pro-Bernie Sanders progressives.
As we all learned this past election, the country desperately wants political outsiders, and that paved the way for a Donald Trump victory.
If Democrats brand another pro-Clinton establishment politician as the face of their party, they will lose big league in 2018 and again in 2020.
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