“What I don’t have right now is an immediate set of tools that I can say to this group: ‘Next week, we can do the following to help you,’” Perez told me. “What we do have right now is what we’re building ... and that ‘we’ is not just us, but the movement that is coming together to recapture our democracy.”

He’s still building. Even the Democratic politicians and operatives who regularly complain to me about Perez have acknowledged that he is in a no-win situation. Staffers at the DNC headquarters know it, too: If the Democratic nominee beats Donald Trump, Perez will get none of the credit, and if the Democrat loses, he’ll get more than his share of the blame. The most frequent criticism I hear about Perez is that by trying to stay “neutral” and not shape the nomination process, he has actually done a lot—that in his mission to restore faith in a retrenched Democratic establishment, he’s instead come off like the embodiment of the establishment’s slow and awkward collapse.

For example, Perez’s critics say that by refusing to change the established DNC rules and hold a climate-change debate, he is betraying the planet. (The counterargument: A concession might have opened the door to any number of topic-specific debates, and it’s not clear that one debate on climate change would have significantly changed how the issue has been addressed in the race.) By not buying ads defending former Vice President Joe Biden from Trump’s smears in the Ukraine scandal, some go as far to say, Perez has betrayed the party and the Constitution (though buying those ads would have opened the DNC up to accusations of favoring one candidate). But perhaps most of all, Perez’s attackers say, by making primary-debate rules that rely on donor and polling thresholds, he’s enabled outsider candidates to advance and prevented more experienced Democrats from gaining momentum.

Read: The Democratic debates aren’t pleasing anyone

I asked Perez about this last claim, specifically: Has he made it so that the candidate who becomes the Democratic nominee is the one who spent months hoop-jumping to qualify for the debates? “Tom hasn’t made sure,” he said. “The voters have made sure.” He went on: “When you’re at zero percent in the polling or 1 percent in a few polls, I don’t see any historic precedent. We’re three months and change out [from the Iowa caucuses]. I mean, nobody who was under 2 percent in the fall for the last 40 years won even a caucus. Nobody under 4 percent in December won anything.”

Jeff Weaver, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont’s top strategist, told me he sees DNC chair as “maybe one of the most difficult jobs in Washington,” while making a point to say Perez has been working hard and doing it “capably.”

Arguably, there has never been a time in modern politics when the DNC was more important. Even though some people have already dropped out, this is still the largest primary field in history (just like everyone else, Perez didn’t expect quite this many people to run). And while Democrats are consumed with fighting for the nomination, with neither the time nor the money to start thinking as far ahead as next November, the Trump campaign is already raising and spending more than any other presidential campaign to date.