The entire staff of the Nevada Democratic Party resigned after each of the party’s leadership seats was won by a coalition of Democratic socialist candidates, The Intercept reports.
Newly-elected Nevada Democratic Party chair Judith Whitmer received an email from executive director Alana Mounce last Saturday, just after winning the election. In the email, Mounce announced that she and every other employee would be resigning, as were all the party’s consultants. The Intercept notes that the Democratic establishment had been prepared for these events, and had already transferred $450,000 out of the party’s account and into the account belonging to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which will likely go towards the reelection of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., in 2022.
Whitmer, in an interview with the Intercept’s “Deconstructed” podcast, denied that she had planned on firing the staffers anyway.
“I’ve been putting in the work,” Whitmer said. “What they just didn’t expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn.”
She added, “We weren’t really surprised,” by the mass resignations, “in that we were prepared for it. But what hit us by surprise and was sort of shocking is that for a slate that claimed that they were all about unity, and kept this false narrative of division going on throughout the entire campaign — in fact they kept intensifying that — that’s what was surprising about it, was the willingness to just walk away, instead of working with us.”
One former Nevada Democratic Party staffer, who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said they quit because “I knew I couldn’t work with her and watch her destroy the years of hard work so many operatives put into making our state party the best state party in the country.”
Keenan Korth, a member of the Nevada Democratic Party’s central committee and a supporter of Whitmer’s, noted that the movement in the party towards the left began about five years ago, after Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, but didn’t truly take hold until his victory in the state’s 2020 Democratic primary. Despite the senator dropping out of the race, Sanders’ organizers established a strong progressive network in the state, helped by outside groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported the coalition of candidates that gained control of the state party last Saturday.
“This was certainly kind of immediately made possible by the caucus outcome,” Korth said. “But it really started before then, in that the caucus results were in and of themselves the result of a sustained organizing effort, and the slow accumulation of organizing infrastructure here post-2016, in large part through the campaign in 2018 for Amy Vilela,” who launched a bid for Congress in Nevada in 2018 and eventually joined the Sanders campaign as the Nevada campaign co-chair.
Source: Newmax
