US Democratic Party votes in new national committee chairman

The U.S. Democratic Party on Saturday voted Tom Perez as its new national committee chairman, as the party struggled to overcome the deep rift among its members.

"They're going to ask the question of all of us: Where were you in 2017 when we had the worst president in the history of the United States? We will be able to say that the Democratic Party led the resistance and made sure this was a one-term president," Perez said after his win.

Perez, the first Latino American to hold the position, won 235 votes after two rounds of balloting, just slightly higher than his main opposition Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota who garnered 200 votes.

The close contest was testament to a fractured Democratic party that is reeling from its sore defeat to Republican Party's Donald Trump in the presidential race. Its members polarized over which direction to take in order to present a convincing opposition in future national and local elections.

Perez, who served as the labor secretary under Barack Obama, represented the establishment of the party and won the backing of many of the most prominent figures of the party, including Obama and his vice president Joe Biden.

Ellison, on the other hand, was often portrayed as the "disrupter" who ran on a platform calling for drastic changes in the party. He was notably endorsed by Bernie Sanders, a liberal Senator that fought with Hillary Clinton for the party nomination last year.

source: Xinhua