Top Democrat to DNC Chair After Iowa Fiasco: Get. Out.

Matt Vespa | February 21, 2020 11:45 AM

Well, the start of the 2020 Democratic primaries were rather disastrous. The party running on the ‘government should control all the things’ platform couldn’t even count 170,000 votes in Iowa. The state party used an app to tabulate the votes and—shocker—there were issues. Unlike 2016, we have no data, not even around 11 P.M. It was a total nightmare. The next day the state party released 62 percent of the results. It came piece by piece, but why should any of the campaigns trust these results? The app was built by former Obama and Clinton operatives, the Iowa Democratic Party chair decided to resign, and even now—the math looks shoddy. As we approach the weekend, Nevada has their caucus and Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has guaranteed there will be no fiasco this time:

Yet, some Democrats are just not happy with Perez’s manning of the ship. Some are saying now that he has to go. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), a congresswoman once thought to be a contender to take on Nancy Pelosi for the House Speakership, unloaded on the national party chair, pretty much saying that Perez has been asleep at the switch (via The Hill):

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), chairwoman of the House Administration Committee’s subpanel on elections, said Perez has failed to take responsibility for the Iowa vote-counting debacle as it unfolded this week, instead shifting blame on lower-ranking party leaders in Des Moines.
“It's a lack of leadership,” Fudge told The Hill on Friday during a brief interview in the Capitol. “If you have the Iowa situation you don't throw them under the bus, you stand up and you support and you try to fix it. He doesn't lead on anything.”
[…]
“You know, they're always talking about how diversity is important,” said Fudge, who had endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) in the Democratic presidential race. Harris has since dropped out of the contest.
“He doesn't care anything about diversity. It's just lip service,” Fudge said of Perez.
[…]
It's a combination of many things,” she said. Iowa was simply “the tipping point.”
“I absolutely have seen no leadership — since Day One,” she said.

Well, the leadership part has been an ongoing criticism. As the DNC remains stuck in neutral concerning fundraising, drowning in debt, Perez decided to take a teaching job at Brown University. Members of the squad were also quoted in this Hill piece, like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who thought Iowa was a total disaster and a disgrace, and that accountability and responsibility has taken by someone. Omar was more direct, saying that this all starts at the top.