As Democrats reel in the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning victory, a new storm is brewing inside the party as competing factions begin to grapple for its leadership.
Howard Dean, who ran the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, announced on Thursday he would again seek its top role. At the same time, Sen. Bernie Sanders — a registered independent who caucuses with Democrats and sought the party’s nomination this year — and top allies are touting Rep. Keith Ellison for the job. The Muslim-American congressman from Minnesota currently co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Ellison supported Sanders in the primary, but emerged as a vocal Hillary Clinton supporter after she emerged as the nominee. Sanders named Ellison to the Democratic convention’s platform drafting committee this summer, filling an influential slot given to the Vermont senator as a concession from the party after an unexpectedly tense nominating contest.
Ellison’s office refused to comment to CNN on the record.
A former governor of Vermont, Dean served as head of the DNC following his own insurgent, though ultimately unsuccessful bid for the party’s 2004 nomination. As part of his leadership, Dean championed a “50-state strategy,” a plan intended to broaden the electoral map for Democrats.
“The dems need organization and focus on the young,” Dean tweeted on Thursday, proposing to renew the strategy. “Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman again.”
But Dean, despite his considerable ties to the more liberal wing of the party, looks to be in for a struggle against a progressive left emboldened by Sanders’ primary bid.
On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders, told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with “a leadership untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs.”
In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, “Any 50-state strategy must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind the agents of a failed leadership.”
The current head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic operative and former CNN contributor, who is leading in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the convention. Hacked emails appeared to show Wasserman Schultz and other since-departed DNC officials discussing ways to undermine Sanders’ effort to oust Clinton in the primary.
Brazile has come under increasing scrutiny after another trove of hacked emails showed her forwarding questions from a town hall jointly hosted by CNN to the Clinton campaign.