DNC Chair Tom Perez goes to war with the state parties

‘I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle at this point,’ said one Democratic state chairman.

By ALEX THOMPSON 12/16/2018 06:56 AM EST

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez launched an attack on his own party’s state organizations Saturday with a long and angry email over the future of the party’s most valuable asset — its voter data file.

Just days before an important Tuesday meeting in D.C. on the future of the data operation, Perez sharply criticized a new proposal from state party leaders and singled out prominent state officials by name.

“For some inexplicable reason, this proposal would tear down just about everything about our current data structure, reversing so much of the progress we made over the past decade,” Perez wrote.

The national chairman, describing his own reaction to the state proposal as “disappointed” and “dumbfounded,” accused the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, Minnesota’s Ken Martin, of undermining the DNC by not keeping other state party officials “in the loop,” prompting withering criticism of Perez from state party leaders.

It‘s the latest fight in a quickly escalating war over the trove of Democratic voter information — a conflict which broke into the open at a gathering of the state parties and the DNC in Puerto Rico late last month. The party’s data is largely owned by the state parties, but there is a considerable amount of other data being collected by outside groups like labor unions and super PACs that could be leveraged to benefit Democratic candidates and the eventual 2020 nominee.

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/16/democrats-perez-state-parties-1066665