DENVER — Keith Ellison came to Colorado seeking to cement his position as the front-runner for Democratic National Committee chairman. But the Minnesota congressman ended the week in worse shape than when it started.

Just hours after Ellison’s role as the favorite was thrown into question by a stinging condemnation of his past statements about Israel by the Anti-Defamation League — a move Ellison and his allies vigorously rebutted — former Chairman Howard Dean dropped his comeback bid and bowed out of the race, scrambling an already complicated contest.


The three remaining announced candidates for the chairmanship — Ellison, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley, and South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison — spoke to state party officials from across the country for nearly two-and-a-half hours here at the Association of State Democratic Chairs meeting, exhaustively laying out their hopes for a rejuvenated party in displays that appeared to leave the DNC membership just as unsure of its next leader's identity as when it entered the room.

The result is a race that’s even more of a muddle, with the likelihood of additional candidates jumping in prior to February’s vote. Ellison himself appeared to recognize his tenuous position, and pledged in his strongest terms yet to consider giving up his House seat if he gets the chair’s role. He pleaded with attendees to keep an open mind as he insisted the DNC would be his top priority, while the other candidates — and Dean, in his pre-recorded video — insisted over and over that the decimated party needs a full-time chair.

Democrats are still on the lookout for the obvious next leader in the Donald Trump era, an increasingly urgent imperative as they seek to minimize the recriminations and deep tactical divides that are starting to surface across the party in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss.

The party leaders need to “pick ourselves up,” said interim chairwoman Donna Brazile in a private session earlier in the day. “But we should not pick each other apart."

The hubbub over Ellison’s past remarks on Israel didn’t surface once, despite their clear resonance among many Democrats — at a separate event Friday, influential party megadonor Haim Saban called Ellison an "anti-Semitic and anti-Israel person."

The candidates instead dove into a series of promises about funding state and local operations, empowering specific constituency groups, and challenging President-elect Trump — topics that qualify as red meat for the party officials gathered in the hotel ballroom.

Each of the candidates pledged to avoid any continuation of the Clinton-Bernie Sanders brawl at the forum moderated by Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio, and each promised to significantly increase attention paid to the state parties themselves.

“The Democratic Party has to transform, we have to transform from simply being a political organization looking for votes every two and four years to becoming a community organization,” said Harrison, adding later that the committee cannot afford to be wholly taken over by the presidential campaign every four years. “The foundation of this party, the state parties, are drying up like grapes on the vine in the California sun."

“Every small unit of the Democratic Party across the nation needs to be in close, tight partnership with the DNC,” said Ellison, pointing to blue states as models for the rest of the country rather than simply as ATMs, as he pledged to place party staff across the country.

And Buckley, a vice-chairman of the DNC who led one of the most successful state parties in a 2016 election cycle that was mostly dark for Democrats, ensured the room knew his record while at the same time getting some distance from the unpopular current committee leadership.

“The DNC has got a lot of work to do. We’ve got to restore some public trust,” he said, pledging to take power away from the chair and hand it to party officers and executive committee members — such as giving the latter a say in the presidential debate schedule.

Even after the forum and Dean news, however, it was clear that the DNC members believed there’s still room for more entrants in the race — the assembled Democrats said they’d be surprised if this field is final.

"I suspect the field is not set and other candidates may emerge, and one of the things we learned in 2016 is that having choices and competition is important,” said Democratic strategist Dave Hamrick.

And in a new landscape with no Democratic White House or centralized rapid response operation, party leaders acknowledged the urgency in establishing the sharp end for the party spear during the opening days of Trump’s presidency — even though the vote for DNC chair itself won’t come until late February.

Weaving through the halls of the Denver Hyatt Regency earlier in the afternoon — a space otherwise occupied by a brigade representing the Colorado State Thespians group — the state party chairs and operatives were still whispering about other names jumping in, with the biggest question mark still surrounding the intentions of Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who is weighing a bid but also considering a run for Maryland governor.

The cabinet secretary is known to be a favorite of some people in the White House — and he even asked AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka to hold off on endorsing anyone until he made a decision — but his intentions remain a mystery even to his fans.

And if not Perez, Democrats continue to wonder if another party grandee will step in to serve as a unifier.

“A lot of the voting members are waiting for [someone new to enter the race],” said former DNC chairman and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, recommending the re-institution of a dual- or multi-chairman system similar to the one implemented under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, given the lack of a unanimously popular candidate.

"Everybody likes — and I put myself in this category — Keith Ellison. We like his personality, his passion, his energy. We like that he represents the part of the party that’s where the energy is coming from. But everybody has doubts, with all the challenges we face, that one could do the job in a part-time capacity."

Both Harrison and Buckley expressed openness to such a co-chair arrangement on Friday, with the South Carolinian specifying that the roles should be split between a man and a woman.

No such deal has been struck this far ahead of the 2017 vote, however, and other Democrats who’ve expressed openness to a run of their own, or been talked about as possibilities, have either declined to make obvious moves forward — like NARAL president Ilyse Hogue and Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander — or bowed out altogether — like Vice President Joe Biden and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

The state of play is obscured by the fact that the party’s core constituency and voting groups have not lined up behind individual candidates, even though Ellison remains the most heavily-endorsed of the group, especially by labor leaders. The state party chairs, for example, had informally agreed to vote as a bloc during a post-election conference call in November. But with two of their ranks now in the race, the status of that pact is unclear.

Dean’s exit complicates the issue even further: while he had not even consolidated support from his fellow Vermonters, a number of long-time members, like Kansas Chairman Lee Kinch, had assumed they would support him.

“It’s been only three weeks since the election and it’s still months before the DNC will select a new chair, so there is no need to rush the process,” said Hamrick, who managed O’Malley’s presidential campaign. "This is the time to have a full and honest debate about the future direction of our party and who we need to lead it."

In the meantime, the process has been far from orderly behind the scenes.

People surrounding Ellison have been working to determine the White House’s intentions in the wake of speculation about a Perez endorsement while Democrats aligned with Sanders have been frustrated that the Minnesota congressman’s team hasn’t relied more on them.

All the while in the states, rank-and-file members of the DNC — the actual voters — have expressed frustration with the swift closing of ranks around Ellison within parts of Washington. That annoyance was reflected in a scathing letter circulated this week by International Association of Firefighters president Harold Schaitberger, who was furious that the AFL-CIO had circulated a ballot with only Ellison’s name on it.

While campaigning has yet to begin in earnest, scattershot pieces of it have been popping up on DNC members’ cell phones and inboxes in recent weeks, even before the Hyatt’s halls filled with Harrison stickers and Ellison buttons. Ellison, Harrison, and Buckley have been speaking with voters personally for weeks, Harrison was boosted by a letter to DNC members from influential South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn this week, and Ellison published his platform on Thursday. Harrison and Buckley each met with the state party executive directors as a group as the ADL’s condemnation of Ellison dropped Thursday.

And even though Friday’s events took place on Buckley’s home turf due to his role as the head of the Association of State Democratic Chairs, both Ellison and Harrison made sure to carve out their own space: each rented private rooms for receptions with voters elsewhere in the hotel to cap off the night.