Sadly, it didn’t come down to a coin toss.
Via The Hill:
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez has defeated Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee in a blow to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the progressive wing of the party.
Perez won with 235 votes on the second ballot, with 218 votes needed to reach a majority. He fell just shy in the first ballot, totaling 213.5 votes.
The win came after Perez failed to clear the threshold required to win the first vote by only one ballot.
Vice President Biden and other key figures from the Obama administration supported Perez, who backed Hillary Clinton in the primary.
Sanders and many of his allies backed Ellison, the first-ever Muslim elected to Congress and a star on the left. Several Ellison supporters told The Hill this week that they are unsure if they can back Perez.
The race to become the next Democratic Party leader split along establishment-grassroots lines and in many ways mirrored the divisive 2016 presidential primary between Sanders and Clinton.
The mainstream Democrats won out again.
Perez, the 55-year-old son of Dominican immigrants, becomes the party’s public face and chief spokesperson in charge of staking out Democratic opposition to President Trump.
Prior to serving as President Obama’s Labor secretary, Perez was a civil rights attorney in the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, who endorsed him in the chairmanship race.
He has almost no electoral experience, save for a successful bid for Montgomery County Council and a failed run at Maryland attorney general, in which he was disqualified over a technicality.
As chairman of the DNC, Perez inherits a monumental rebuilding project across the country after years of Democratic losses at every level of government.
And he will also have to go about the work of unifying a fractured party.
While Democrats sought to squash the intra-party divisions that linger from the contentious presidential primary, the campaign to be the next DNC chairman became a proxy battle between the rival factions.
Perez’s win is a victory for centrist Democrats, many of whom were wary of handing the party over to the Sanders wing. But his election risks infuriating progressives, many of whom wanted to see Ellison, an early supporter of Sanders, installed atop the DNC.
There are still bitter feelings among Sanders supporters who feel the DNC — then led by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) — rigged the primary against Sanders and in favor of Clinton. Wasserman Schultz resigned at the Democratic National Convention after hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks appeared to show DNC staffers working to undermine Sanders.
HT: Snowbird_in_AZ