Democrats sweat Clinton vs. Sanders rift

 

Long after the presidential nomination was settled, the contentious 2016 primary fight continues to divide the party.

The 2016 primary fight continues to divide the party, hindering Democrats’ ability to unite and prompting national party leaders to tiptoe around the issue.

The Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders rift is bubbling up in gubernatorial primaries. It’s pulsing through the race for Democratic National Committee chairman, and shaping state party leadership contests from Hawaii to Maine.

Long after the Democratic presidential nomination was settled, the bruising 2016 primary fight continues to divide the party, hindering Democrats’ ability to unite and prompting national party leaders to tiptoe around the issue in the hopes of avoiding an outbreak of Sanders-Clinton proxy wars. The bitter defeat at the hands of Donald Trump has exacerbated the tensions, leading to the rise of “Bernie would have won” and “Bernie’s challenge helped sink Hillary” camps, even if the battles are rarely framed in such explicit terms. Now, with the chairmanship of the DNC and party nominations in multiple 2017 races at stake, some Democrats are desperately trying to strike a balance and remind rank-and-file activists of the real enemy.

“The old-fashioned way to do this is to purge the party, but that’s not the way things work anymore,” said former Vermont governor and DNC chairman Howard Dean, who himself passed on a second run for the chairmanship in December specifically because he was worried about the prospect of an overly divisive race. “The party can’t win if it’s not inclusive, and the way to be inclusive is not to re-litigate the old battle. And there’s obviously some attempt to do that."

“There are some people who are itching to have this fight,” Dean, a 2004 presidential candidate and 2016 Clinton backer, added. “I think it’s silly, and I think they’re going to lose."

The Clinton vs. Sanders narrative is already coloring the DNC chair race, despite the strenuous efforts of each of the declared candidates to downplay it: the candidates are clear in their stump speeches about their wish to avoid a redux of their primary fight, and some campaigns have drawn up internal memos and circulated talking points describing how their candidate bridges the divide.