Michael Collins

USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee

WASHINGTON – Will Cheek is only half joking when he talks about what will be needed to get the national Democratic Party back on track after its devastating losses in last year’s elections.

“You will need a miracle worker,” he said.

Miracle workers are hard to find, but the Tennessee Democrats who have a say in who will be the national party’s next chairman want someone who can reconnect the party with the working-class voters who abandoned it last November. For most of them, former Labor Secretary Tom Perez fits that bill.

“He’s a man of great integrity,” said Bill Owen, a Democratic National Committee member from Knoxville. “When he says something, you can depend on what he says.”

Four of the five Tennesseans who are voting members of the DNC are backing Perez as the party’s next chairman. The holdout is Mary Mancini, chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party. Mancini said she wants to hear from the other candidates before making an endorsement but expects to make her pick this week.

“We’re at a crossroad, and it’s really important to get somebody in that position who understands that we need a lot of help in southern states and that we could use their expertise and their ability to do outreach into rural places,” Mancini said. “I’m just trying to figure out who has the most experience doing that.”

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DNC members will pick the new chairman in Atlanta on Feb. 25. Seven candidates are running, but the two who appear to have the most support are Perez and Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison. Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., also is considered a viable contender.

Perez, 55, who lives in Maryland, worked for several years as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division until President Barack Obama picked him to serve as labor secretary in 2013. Perez held that position until the end of Obama’s presidency.

Perez’s background as labor secretary would benefit Democrats as they try to reach rural working-class voters, such as farmers and factory workers, said John Litz, a DNC member from Morristown.

“They feel like they’ve been left behind by Democrats, and I’m afraid they have been,” Litz said. “As the Democratic Party, I believe, that our future is us moving back to the middle of the road. When the tea party took over the Republican Party and pushed them so far to the right, we as Democrats ended up doing the opposite and tried to push much too far to the left. We need to come back to the middle, and Tom Perez has got the ability and the know-how to do that."

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Cheek, a DNC member from Nashville, said while he would prefer that the party’s new chairman come from the South, he thinks Perez can relate to Tennessee.

“When you’re in the position I’m in, you would prefer a southerner who really understood the South to somehow figure out a way out of this situation that we’re in,” Cheek said. “But barring that, I think he speaks plainly. He speaks well. I think he’ll do a good job.”

The South continues to be rough terrain for Democrats. With the exception of Virginia, southern states went solidly Republican red in last year’s presidential race. In Tennessee, Republican Donald Trump took 61 percent of the vote, beating the margins of both Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. The GOP also expanded its supermajority in the state House to 74 of the 99 seats and held onto their 28-5 advantage in the state Senate.

The next DNC chairman needs to be someone who will support the state parties as they work to broaden their outreach to voters, Cheek said.

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One possible opportunity for Democrats to make some inroads is with moderate Republican women who may be turned off by Trump’s comments and attitudes toward other members of their sex, he said.

“We can’t wait for the demographics to change in the state,” Cheek said. “The demographics are changing as demographics do – they change slowly, glacially. Now, we’ve got to win some hearts and minds.”

Michael Collins is the Washington correspondent for the USA Today Network-Tennessee. His weekly Tennessee in D.C. column highlights Volunteer State lawmakers, causes and connections. Contact him at 703-854-8927 or mcollins2@gannett.com.