Ellison or Perez?

Above: Idiotic bullshit

I have stated several times that the DNC race is an overheated attempt to relitigate the primary at great damage to the party. It barely matters who the head of the DNC is. The idea that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was the greatest enemy to democracy since Benito Mussolini was so ridiculously out of proportion to what was actually going on that it should have led everyone involved to rethink their lives. However, in the end, as much as I absolutely think Tom Perez is a wonderful leader and the greatest Secretary of Labor since Frances Perkins, I have to support Keith Ellison for this role. That’s for two reasons. First, I’m uncomfortable with the people who have gotten behind Perez, in particular remnant conservative elements who seem to think that a Muslim as DNC chair would turn off voters. No. That’s a failure of leadership and Islamophobic. Second, the energy is behind Ellison. He represents a more leftist future for that party that I feel will energize voters. But again, maybe it doesn’t matter because both candidates are great and both are avoiding following New York Times stories about white men voting Republican as policy preferences. Steve Phillips:

If progressive whites are defecting because they are uninspired by Democrats, moving further to the right will only deepen their disillusionment. But if the next D.N.C. chairman can win them back, the country’s demographic trends will tilt the field in Democrats’ favor. As Mrs. Clinton’s popular vote margin showed, there is still a new American majority made up of a meaningful minority of whites and an overwhelming majority of minorities. Not only is there little evidence that Democrats can do significantly better with those white working-class voters who are susceptible to messages laced with racism and sexism, but that sector of the electorate will continue to shrink in the coming years. Nearly half of all Democratic votes (46 percent) were not white in 2016, and over the next four years, 10 million more people of color will be added to the population, as compared with just 1.5 million whites.

Keith Ellison, a D.N.C. chairman candidate, has a proven record of engaging core Democratic voters rather than chasing the elusive conservative whites, and the party would be in good hands under his stewardship. (Thomas E. Perez, the former labor secretary, has less electoral history, but his reliance on political superstars such as the strategist Emmy Ruiz, who delivered victories for Democrats in Nevada and Colorado, is encouraging.)

Whoever prevails as chairman must resist the pressure to follow an uninformed and ill-fated quest for winning over conservative white working-class voters in the Midwest. The solution for Democrats is not to chase Trump defectors. The path to victory involves reinspiring those whites who drifted to third-party candidates and then focusing on the ample opportunities in the Southwest and the South.

Mrs. Clinton came closer to winning Texas than she did Iowa. She fared better in Arizona, Georgia and Florida than she did in the traditional battleground state of Ohio. The electoral action for Democrats may have once been in the Rust Belt, but it’s now moving west and south.

Either candidate will pursue these voters as the base of the future. So in the end, I’m good either way. And you should be too.