A Year Later, DNC Still Struggles to Heal Sanders-Clinton Rift

in the midst of the DNC’s ongoing effort to heal the rift between the Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton wings of the Democratic Party, the DNC is now beginning to realize how big of an undertaking this will actually be.

According to Politico, there is tension over whether Sanders should hand over his massive voter list to the committee, as DNC Chairman Tom Perez has asked, and whether the committee has gone far enough to overhaul internal rules that Sanders supporters are convinced rigged the nomination for Clinton.

Neither side is reportedly satisfied, despite the formation of a “Unity Commission” made up of former Clinton and Sanders allies who have been meeting to solve these issues. Words like “crazy,” “still doesn’t get it” and “Judas” have been used to describe people in the opposite camp.

Perez said, “I knew it was a turnaround job when I ran, but I undeniably underestimated the depth of the turnaround job. We had to rebuild almost every facet of the organization, and equally importantly, we had to rebuild trust,” Perez said in a recent interview at party headquarters. “Not just people who had invested in the DNC, but others, they just felt the party had let them down.”

Tom Perez, a former Clinton and Obama aide, won the DNC Chair vote after former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was ousted from the party’s leadership due to her favoritism towards Clinton and mismanagement of the party’s resources.

Perez beat out a Sanders ally, Rep. Keith Ellison from Minnesota, for the DNC Chair position by a vote of 235-200. Perez did, however, appoint Ellison as deputy chair in an effort to ease the ongoing tension within the party.

Fundraising, though still trailing behind the Republican National Committee, is reportedly improving due to a major donor program Perez is overseeing and donations that increased after recent Democratic victories in Virginia and Alabama.

Though the party has its eyes on the 2018 midterm elections, which will be an indication of whether their efforts to fix the party have worked, we won’t completely know if the neutrality efforts are successful until we see how they approach the 2020 presidential election.