MESA, Ariz. — At 7 a.m. last Thursday, Tom Perez found himself sprinting through Reagan National Airport, dripping sweat, with no ticket in hand, determined to plead his case to a skeptical flight agent, re-open the boarding door, and take his seat.

Earlier that morning, around 5 a.m., a Lyft driver's flat tire had derailed his plan to fly from Baltimore to Salt Lake City, where he was due to rejoin Bernie Sanders for the final stretch of their week-long "Come Together and Fight Back" tour — an early effort by Perez as the new chair of the Democratic National Committee to bridge a divided party and bring alienated progressives back into the fold of institutional politics.

So he made his way home to Takoma Park, got in his car, and re-routed to Reagan National for a 7:15 a.m. nonstop. "I don’t even remember where I parked," he laughed. At 6:50 a.m., "I'm at the counter with no ticket. And the guy looks at me like, 'You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.'" Perez booked a later flight instead, but ran through security, heading for the 7:15 a.m. gate. "I see the guy literally about to close the door, and I’m like, 'Yo! Sir! Can you help me!" He’s looking at me like, 'You got a ticket for this?'" (No.) "So I walk a short distance away. I’m figuring out my plan B, watching the plane." A few minutes later, a delay was announced. Perez flashed what he called a "puppy-dog look" back at the gate. The agent relented: "OK," he motioned, "come over here."

In Perez's telling, it wasn't too different from most days on the job as chair.

"I’ve always felt that you get more bees with honey than with vinegar," he said later that night from the backseat of a darkened suburban, rolling from an evening rally outside Phoenix to the airport, where a chartered plane would be waiting with Sanders.

The mantra extends to his approach when it comes to the liberal activists who attended the party’s week of “unity”-themed rallies to cheer on Sanders and, in several instances, to boo Perez and the DNC, drawing national headlines questioning the tour’s success.

Perez, the 55-year-old former civil rights lawyer and labor secretary, is now two months into the job. The DNC, a relatively powerless Washington institution when it comes to the task of running races across the country, has nevertheless become a major source of dissatisfaction among voters on the left. During the 2016 Democratic primary, hacked internal emails showed the DNC unfairly favored Hillary Clinton over Sanders. And earlier this year, the 15-week chair's race between Perez and the progressive candidate of choice, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, now DNC deputy chair, came to embody the running tension inside the party between establishment power and grassroots activism.

The same signs of strain spilled out into the public as Perez and Sanders traveled together to rallies from Florida and Utah to Arizona and Nevada. At one event in Maine, the crowd followed a round of "Bernie!" chants with a wave of boos when an introductory speaker mentioned "the new DNC chairman and the future of the Democratic Party." At another in Las Vegas, staffers paced the room on watch for protesters, escorting one with a "No Super Delegates Or STFU" sign to the back of the University of Nevada arena.

Perez both shrugs off the incidents and insists they're part of the point. "For every booer," he said, there are hundreds more "who want the party to succeed, have frustrations, and want to make sure that somebody is listening to them."

"And that’s what I’m trying to do — and that’s why I haven’t seen my family very much lately, and that’s why I almost missed a flight this morning."

The job of party chair, Democratic or Republican, can be thankless. But as Perez sees it, his primary role in these first six months is simply to listen — to “of course” let people vent, he said, even boo if they want. "I want to hear directly the frustrations of people who feel the party hasn’t met their expectations.” So far, Perez has heard a lot of that: the black voters from Flint, Michigan, who told him, "You guys take us for granted"; the steelworker from a family of Democrats who said, "I don’t know who to trust."

The party's most pressing problem, Perez said, is "we lose the battle of the bumper sticker." In his estimation, President Trump is leagues ahead. Take the steelworker: When "Trump says I’m gonna bring your coal jobs back," Perez argued, "he knows that’s bullshit, but at least Donald Trump is speaking to his fears. And he knows that his dad was a Democrat, and he was a Democrat, but he’s not sure why anymore."

Despite the negative reviews of the "Come Together and Fight Back" tour, "for me,” said Perez, it was "a great trip” — in part, he added, because of the week on the road with Sanders. The two didn’t know one another well before the tour. Some flights were quiet, aides said, with Sanders reading his iPad and eating peanuts. On others, the two spent hours talking about Perez’s kids, Sanders’ grandkids — and about policy. (On one westward stretch, a staffer said, Sanders pointed in outrage at the empty desert below, asking how there could be so much sun and land and not a single solar panel.)

Asked what Sanders is like, Perez had a simple reply: “He is passionate.”

