She starts the phone calls with, “Tom, this is Hillary.”

“Hey, how are you?” he responds, consciously working his way around being so formal at this point in their relationship, but also too ingrained in his Dominican upbringing to just start calling her by her first name.


Hillary Clinton and Tom Perez have had some practice with the routine, according to sources familiar with the conversations. There was the phone call when she called to ask for his endorsement, which became a nerd-out session on prison reform and registering farmworkers. In March, when she asked for his help on Latino engagement ahead of the New York primary, he pushed for her to send him to a politically powerful local union president to ask for his help — and ended up being asked himself to rile up a bundler session the morning after the New York debate.

Then there was the call in April, when she called to congratulate him about the new conflict of interest rule his Labor Department had just released. Before long, she was grilling him: who on the Hill had helped? What sort of response was he getting?

Perez had only met Clinton in passing before last summer, when he happened to get scheduled ahead of her at the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) conference in Las Vegas—just a typical day for a Labor secretary, he mock-complained to staff, with all those cameras arrayed to see him. She called over to him, introduced herself, thanked him for the work he was doing. They spent about 15 minutes together, complete with photos and teasing his former press secretary who’s now her director of black, Latino and women’s media.

But something clicked, between those encounters and the clutches he was pulled into before hitting the spin rooms at the debates he attended.

That’s how a low-profile Cabinet secretary who’s only ever been elected to the Montgomery, Md.,County Council ended up near the mix of Clinton’s running mate prospects. It’s largely a reflection of the relationship that he’s struck up over the past year with both the former secretary of state—who doesn’t make new friends easily—and former President Bill Clinton, and what they’ve seen him do.

Unlike the other people being speculated about as running mate picks, Perez has actually gotten to know the Clintons, and they’ve both taken a shine to him after the year he spent putting his own progressive credentials on the line to knock back Bernie Sanders. Arguing forcefully that she’s a change agent—the former president’s made clear he’s particularly sensitive when people say otherwise—appears to have made an impression, too.

Clinton’s inner circle is debating whether entrenched opinions about both her and Donald Trump leaves them free to pick a running mate without having to worry about moving the needle in a state or a particular demographic or political agenda, wondering if the focus should be fully on the potential partnership of the next eight years.

It certainly won’t be decided on long personal relationships, since with the exception of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who’s not seen as in deep contention, Clinton doesn’t know well any of the people being talked about as her pick.

Clinton's campaign didn't return requests for comment.

Though she’ll hit the campaign trail with Tim Kaine on Thursday and has known him somewhat professionally over the years, she’s rarely been in the same room with him — he arrived in the Senate after she left. So did Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, with whom she has a longer history that’s recovered in recent years. She overlapped two years with Sherrod Brown, but she was off on her first White House race within weeks of his swearing-in.

She’s had a few short conversations with HUD Secretary Julían Castro, mostly around his offering his endorsement when they ran into each other at one event last summer, and her formally asking him for it as they stood in the back of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala last fall. She’s known Rep. Xavier Becerra since she was first lady and likes him, has had several group dinners with him over the last year, but still mispronounces his name with an extra emphasis on the vowel in the last syllable.

It’s been different with Perez.

When he formally endorsed her in October, he spent the whole day with her, flying together from stop to stop in Iowa, chatting as they went. After he introduced her at a town hall in Mount Vernon, she kept asking him to chime in on questions. Along the way, they talked about Ted Kennedy, Perez’s old boss and hero, and a person Clinton brought up as her example of being a “progressive who gets stuff done.”

Perez, enjoying the biggest political spotlight of his life, kept himself nearly constantly on the road, on TV, on Spanish-language radio. In Nevada, he met with the powerful Culinary Workers union and worked the back of the casino room floors with Bill Clinton ahead of the caucuses. He was in the room as the young girl — featured in Clinton’s closing ad in the state speaking about her fear of her parents being deported — ran onto the candidate’s lap and clung to her for 20 minutes.

Out on the trail, he’s talked about how startled he was in that moment, yet another reminder he argues that she is, as he likes to say, “the most famous unknown person in America.”

Labor Secretary Tom Perez (right) joins HIllary Clinton at a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, in December 2015. | AP Photo

He was all over New York ahead of that primary, just as aware as the Clinton and Sanders campaigns were about how much she needed that win. He was up in Buffalo, and out in Long Island. The day of the debate in Brooklyn, in addition to speaking to the local 32BJ president and some Clinton staff, he spent so long at Rockefeller Center doing a Telemundo interview that he hit rush hour traffic en route to Harlem for a Latino Victory Fund event, ditched his detail and took the subway instead. He jumped back on afterwards to get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in time for his spin room duties.

Clinton rewarded him by pulling him on stage the night she gave her New York victory speech. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, specifically requested Perez travel with him and be part of his whole Memorial Day weekend swing west ahead of the California primary, rather than just jumping in for a stop or two.

The connection is about more than just the principals.

Perez already knew Clinton campaign chair John Podesta from their overlap in the Obama administration, and has a long standing relationship with Donna Shalala, Bill Clinton's Health and Human Services secretary and now the president of the Clinton Foundation. Soon he was consulting with top campaign advisers Jake Sullivan and Maya Harris on policy.

That’s worked out well so far, and could lead to bigger things if he’s her pick and they win, say Perez fans.

“The rapport of the principals is really important in the public-facing way, but the connection between the staff is what’s important in the day-to-day,” said Robert Raben, a friend of Perez and assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration. “Whether or not the vice president gets handed a portfolio, or is the fungible person who gets sent to the Bosnian funeral—it’s heavily a function of how their staffs do.”