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.

The Sanders wing’s preferred candidate, Rep. Keith Ellison, has repeatedly gone out of his way to frame himself as the “unity” candidate against his main opponent, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, a top Clinton surrogate in 2016 who has been flexing his own progressive muscles to appeal to the party’s left wing.

To Ellison — one of Sanders’ first endorsers before becoming a prominent Clinton surrogate — the common reading of his race as a Clinton-Sanders proxy war has been a source of frustration, according to people who have spoken with him in recent weeks.

As such, the Minnesotan and his team have worked to make “unity” a buzzword in his campaign, and his courtship conversations with DNC members are often peppered with his descriptions of work he did for Clinton as well as Sanders. To underscore the point, the raft of endorsements he unveiled in the early days of the campaign was packed not only with Sanders backers, but prominent Clinton surrogates like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Perez, who drew mention as a dark horse vice-presidential pick for Clinton, often avoids talking about the 2016 race on the trail, preferring to spin the conversation forward — his campaign website, for example, contains no mention of Clinton or Sanders, instead leaning on President Barack Obama, a universally popular figure in the party. Asked about parallels between the DNC race and the Democratic presidential primary, Perez begged off, declining to use the names Sanders or Clinton.

"This race is about the future of the Democratic Party, how we move forward together to address the existential threats, frankly, that Donald Trump presents to this nation," he said. "I've worked very closely with everybody in every wing of the party because I've fought a lot of fights side-by-side with them. The big tent of the Democratic Party is our greatest strength."

At the party's first forum for chair candidates on Saturday, the need to avoid a primary fight redux was front-and-center. "I am not interested in re-litigating the 2016 primary. We've all been through that," said South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a contender who jumped into the race by explicitly promising to circumvent such a battle. "As was said before, Donald J. Trump will be president of the United States in a week. We don't have time to re-litigate 2016."

"People ask me, 'Are you a Clinton Democrat or a Bernie Democrat? Guys, I grew up in South Carolina, and all I've ever been is a Democrat," added South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison, another candidate.

There are obvious incentives for Perez and Ellison, both noted liberals, to stay out of the presidential fight. Some Clinton backers have laid into Ellison for the Sanders criticisms that they think ultimately cost the former secretary of state the race. Some of the Vermont senator's supporters have accused Perez of abandoning progressive principles altogether over his support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade program. The cabinet secretary is aware of his need to win over skeptical liberals, while the congressman knows he has to prove his team player credentials to establishment Democrats who make up most of the DNC voting base.

“Everyone wants to make it a big surrogate race for Hillary and Bernie. But it’s got nothing to do with Hillary and Bernie,” insisted former California Governor Gray Davis, a longtime Clinton ally. “The DNC should stop seeing itself as a debating society and the face of the party, and more as the infrastructure of the party."

But the divide isn’t simply a Democratic primary rehash. It’s also about ideology, as ascendant progressives aligned with Sanders look to place Clinton’s establishment-oriented liberalism in the rear-view mirror.

Some Sanders allies are eager to see a version of the debate burst into the open on a national scale after a handful of his acolytes scored victories in recent races for state party chairmanships. In Virginia, many Democrats expect former Rep. Tom Perriello — hardly a Sanders-style liberal — to shift to his left to embrace Sanders backers in his gubernatorial primary against Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, who hails from the party’s moderate wing. In New Jersey, advisors of former ambassador, DNC finance chair, and Goldman Sachs banker Phil Murphy are eager to portray him as the progressive outsider in his New Jersey gubernatorial primary race against two state lawmakers — one of whom has a Sanders alum running his campaign.

Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a frequent target of liberals, appeared with Sanders to unveil a debt-free college proposal earlier this month, as he approaches his 2018 re-election campaign. Sanders himself has been more focused on his Senate work than on party politics. And on Capitol Hill, no Clinton-Sanders proxy fights have yet broken out in a place full of Clinton allies and comparatively few Sanders backers.

The senator’s confidants are careful not to look either bitter or triumphant — “We wouldn’t frame anything as Bernie-Clinton,” said Larry Cohen, the board chairman of Our Revolution, the successor group to Sanders’ campaign — but his supporters aren’t shy in invoking his name. And they’re already taking Sanders’ so-called political revolution to the states: while Maine Democratic Party Chairman Phil Bartlett — a Clinton super delegate — managed to stave off a Sanders-inspired challenge, another Sanders backer, Tim Vandeveer, captured Hawaii’s party chairmanship. Fights are now brewing in more than roughly half a dozen other states as other Sanders supporters look to replace entrenched state party leaders.

There's Iowa, where Our Revolution has endorsed a candidate, and Washington, where Sanders backers are furiously working to challenge incumbent chairman Jaxon Ravens. Similar stories are unfolding in Wisconsin, Florida, and Wyoming. "Which state is next?" is a frequent topic of conversation among the remaining chairs.

“It’s not necessarily the Bernie versus Hillary wings of the party. There is this grassroots movement voters’ arm of the party, and the more corporate, institutional part of the party. And the movement arm is tired of the institutional part telling us the only place for us is in the streets,” said Nebraska Democratic Party Chairwoman Jane Kleeb, a Sanders and Ellison supporter who was elected in June in another race with clear Clinton-Sanders fault lines. "We are saying no, because you’re losing elections with only corporate, institutional folks at the table. We deserve a seat at the table also."

"Senator Sanders is so vocal in the public and online, so of course in the grassroots we use him as an example and institutional Democrats use Clinton as an example,” she explained. "So, of course, he looms large. And he should." With three more official candidate forums and scores of local party gatherings with the candidates planned before the late February DNC chair election, the campaigns are aware the coming weeks are more likely than not to bring up some of the messier flash points from 2016.

“It might take a few more months” before tensions cool, acknowledged Wyoming Democratic Party Chairwoman Ana Cuprill, a candidate for DNC secretary who has come under local fire for her role as a Clinton super-delegate, and who is up for re-election in April. “With the inauguration coming up, there are going to be a lot of really torn-up folks dealing with those emotions from November."

Anna Palmer and Daniel Strauss contributed to this report.