Aside from the wonkiest of Washington circles and the most progressive corners of the left, no one’s heard of Tom Perez. He isn’t young or handsome. He has zero foreign policy experience. The highest office he’s been elected to is a suburban county council.

Yet the labor secretary has emerged as a sleeper pick for vice president, with chatter building among top Democrats — including Elizabeth Warren.


The Massachusetts senator and a few of her colleagues were standing around on the House floor in late September after Pope Francis’ address to a joint meeting of Congress, playing the Hillary Clinton running-mate guessing game.

Warren, never much one for speculation doesn’t usually talk politicking. But looking at Perez standing with them and thinking about their work together, she joined in.

“Oh, you’d be great, Tom,” she said.

The other senators quickly started agreeing — maybe Perez was the one who could make Clinton stick to the progressive politics people in that group wanted.

“That’s interesting,” National Economic Council Director Jeff Zients, who was also present, joked awkwardly. “Hear that, Tom?”

Perez became uncomfortable, smiled and quickly walked away.

All this happened back when people thought Bernie Sanders wouldn’t make it to March, much less be exposing day after day how much trouble Clinton’s having convincing the left flank of the party that she’s really with them.





Six weeks later, Zients invited Perez and his wife over for dinner with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, another frequent collaborator in the administration who’s also become very friendly with the labor secretary.

The dinner was social, but Zients and McDonough wanted to introduce him to another close friend: Tom Nides, a former assistant secretary of state who is a close informal adviser to Clinton’s campaign.

The Perez buzz is beginning to spread. Many top aides in the White House, when they talk about the VP pick, talk about Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a friend of President Barack Obama who is widely admired in the West Wing. The most they were thinking about Perez running for office was for Maryland governor in 2018.

But over beers, some of the rank-and-file White House staffers who are part of what’s been referred to as the “cult of Perez” see things differently.

“My strong guess,” one White House aide said, “is that if you took a straw poll of staffers here about who they’d pick for the ticket, Tom would do very well.”

The idea of Perez making the leap to vice president is, on the face of it, inconceivable: Aside from his limited experience in elected office, it’s not as though Clinton would need him to win Maryland or the couldn’t-be-more-liberal D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, where he lives.

Except that Perez has more credibility with committed progressives — who measure politicians by their battle scars — than almost anyone else around. The unions love him so much that they campaigned against his nomination to replace Eric Holder as attorney general in late 2014 because they didn’t want to lose him at the Labor Department.

He’s spent years working at the Justice Department on voting rights, civil rights and police misconduct, right in the center of issues that have exploded among African-Americans and progressive Democrats. He’s adored in the White House, where he’s been a main player in crafting the Obama second-term domestic agenda, and he’s got a knack for a fiery stump speech. Also, he’s Dominican. And unlike Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, the other Latino Cabinet secretary and more frequent subject of VP speculation (to whom nearly every conversation about Perez becomes at least an implicit comparison), Perez speaks fluent Spanish.

“Our experience is that Tom knows working families in his bones. You don’t have to do a lot of explaining to him when you’re talking to him, and he just knows how to act,” said Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry, who declined to comment on the speculation but called Perez “one of the finest labor secretaries since Frances Perkins,” referring to the fourth labor secretary, who served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

To Perez’s fans, he’s the under-the-radar choice who checks every box Clinton’s going to need if she is the nominee: progressives, unions, African-Americans, Obama loyalists, Latinos. Even some senior Democrats who think the idea is a long shot acknowledge it’s a unique marriage of message and moment.

“To me you want somebody who can excite the Democratic Party, and he is a guy who can do it. He’s a great speaker and he happens to be Hispanic,” said former Rep. Tony Coelho, who was chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. “I think he’s ideal in every way for her.”

Coelho has taken to introducing Perez at events as “my candidate for vice president.”

He wouldn’t say whether he’s said the same to the people close to Clinton whom he’s been in touch with.

Perez, who started out in Washington as an aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, has developed a knack for building relationships with local officials and business leaders, like the Wells Fargo CEO with whom he worked through a $600 million gap in the 2012 mortgage settlement.

Others have taken notice. For example, Perez and hedge fund billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer have struck up a friendship, and in early March, Steyer and major Obama donor Mark Gallogly dropped in at the Labor Department for a long conversation with Perez. The vice presidential speculation didn’t come up. But Steyer and Gallogly walked away impressed, people familiar with the conversation say.

Clinton, who hasn’t spent much time with any of the people being talked about as prospective running mates (the selection process is way, way down the road, people familiar with the matter say), has taken a liking to Perez and spent a fair amount of time with him, beginning with a long phone conversation wonking out on economic development and other progressive policy measures when she called to ask for his endorsement.

“I think I can do more service to you as a progressive validator than as a Latino validator,” he said, according to people who’ve recounted the conversation.

Perez had already been talking with the Clinton campaign for months, in touch with campaign chairman John Podesta, communications director Jennifer Palmieri, and senior advisers Jake Sullivan and Maya Harris as they developed the former secretary of state’s policies on voting rights, apprenticeships and police misconduct.

After Perez endorsed Clinton in Iowa, the two traveled together for a few days. At the second town hall they did together, Clinton kept turning questions over to him: “Tom, why don’t you take that one?” she’d say.





Ahead of the Nevada caucuses, the Clinton campaign had Perez camped out in the Silver State for a week: He’s the one it sent to a long meeting with the Culinary Workers Union, which people involved credit with helping keep the union neutral, and he stood with Bill Clinton at the back of the house at casinos, talking with workers in Spanish.

People involved expect Perez’s next stop will be in Arizona. It’s not just that there are a lot of Latinos there. That’s also the home turf of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who these days is a big Donald Trump backer. Five years ago, Arpaio was on the losing end of the SB 1070 immigration bill lawsuit that Perez spearheaded when he was running the DOJ’S Civil Rights Division during Obama’s first term.

Perez declined to comment for this story. People who’ve spoken to him about this say he’s uncomfortable being the sudden center of speculation.

But the idea has started to take hold, and there he was, before and after last week’s Democratic debate in Miami, pushing hard for Clinton.

“In my conversations with Secretary Clinton — these date back quite a while, before the campaign really reached the pitch that it’s at right now — I think she understood early on that the principal issue was economics: It’s the economy, stupid, and it’s shared prosperity, stupid,” he said in the spin room afterward. “She doesn’t talk about it in terms of revolutions. She talks about it in terms of bold ideas that can get done.”

