"We need a leader in the party who's a leader, who's a fighter, who's a proven progressive," Labor Secretary Tom Perez said Wednesday. | Getty DNC candidates sound the alarm on Trump

Democrats are almost out of time.

With Donald Trump's inauguration fast approaching, that was the sentiment of the candidates running for Democratic National Committee chair during the second of six scheduled forums on Wednesday night. "Donald is our president in 48 hours or less," Labor Secretary Tom Perez said at the beginning of the Huffington Post-hosted forum at George Washington University. "We need a leader in the party who's a leader, who's a fighter, who's a proven progressive, who can be a communicator, who can be a turnaround specialist."


Seven candidates took the stage for the roughly 90-minute forum: Perez, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison, former Fox News analyst Jehmu Greene, Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton Brown, Rep. Keith Ellison, and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. All spoke of the urgency of picking a new DNC leader.

"We cannot protect, Social Security, a woman's right to choose, we can't protect our economic security unless we win elections," Ellison said at another point in the debate. "That's the job of the DNC chair, to win elections."

Asked at another point during the debate if Democrats should try and work with Trump or resist him, the universal response was resist.

Trump, Ellison said, "has already shown us where he stands. From the very beginning, he put in Steve Bannon, who is a renowned white supremicist and misogynist and then he proceeded to put someone in [the Labor Department] who is an anti-labor candidate."

When Huffington Post moderators Ryan Grim and Lydia Polgreen asked the candidates how to fight Trump, Perez warned against taking a "spoon to a knife fight" and Brown said "facts don't matter anymore. We need to start talking about what's right and wrong."

With the actual vote for the next DNC chair still a month away, the forum offered the lesser-known candidates a chance to attract attention on the same stage as the high profile front runners, Ellison and Perez. "There's plenty of time for a candidate who is relatively less known or even unknown to many to basically come into a room and to exceed expectations," said former DNC chairman Steve Grossman. "And to exceed expectations in such a way that that candidate begins to have a surge, build some momentum and then the word gets around."

Candidates like Harrison, Buttigieg, Brown, Greene, and Buckley are looking to use the forums to endear themselves to DNC voters. They've all frequently promised to revert back to former DNC chairman Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

"The problems that we had weren't 2016 problems," Harrison said in response to a question about where Democrats went wrong in the 2016 election cycle. "The problems that we had is that we abandoned the 50-state strategy when [Dean] was at the DNC."

Ellison was put on the defensive when all the candidates were asked about Democratic megadonor Haim Saban's assertion that Ellison's past comments and positions indicate he's "clearly an anti-semitic and anti-Israel individual."

But the other candidates didn't move to pounce on the remark and Buckley even said "an attack against one of us is an attack against all of us."

The Minnesota congressman explained that he has since talked with Saban.

"Haim and I did have a phone call. And we're going to get together," Ellison said while refusing to offer more details of the call. "I think we're on the road to recovery in that regard."

With plenty of undecided DNC members, it's unlikely any of the seven candidates will drop out anytime soon, said Mississippi Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Moak, who is undecided.

"I think it's early and I don't think anybody's discouraged enough to get out yet. I don't think anybody's put together the requisite number of votes to say 'I'm in' either," Moak said.

Asked why he thought no candidate had locked up a majority of the 447-voting DNC members, Moak said, "I think if I was one of the guys who just got into the race, I would count, and if the votes weren't there, I wouldn't be wasting my time."

