DNC chair: I plan to stay

by Ben Kamisar - 06/14/16 5:55 PM ET

DNC Chair @dwstweets on @BernieSanders calls for a new Democratic Party leadership. https://t.co/YOfGd46n2F

— Meet the Press (@meetthepress) June 14, 2016

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Tuesday said she plans to serve out her term with the party despite Bernie Sanders’s calls for her to step down.

She fell back on variations of the same answer as MSNBC’s Chuck Todd repeatedly peppered her with questions about her future with the party. At the end of the interview, Todd followed up again to make sure she had been clear.

{mosads}”I just want to clarify — you plan on being the chair of the DNC through November?” Todd asked on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily.”

“I am planning on continuing to focus all the way through the election to the end of my term on making sure that we can elect Democrats up and down the ballot, especially including the president of the United States.”

She didn’t deny that her position is being used as a bargaining chip between the party and Sanders, whose campaign has regularly called on her to step down amid accusations she tilted the scales toward Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. And she didn’t answer whether she would step down if she felt that she was an impediment to the negotiations between the two candidates.

Instead, she kept arguing that the party will come together.

“I am confident because Donald Trump is so incredibly dangerous and really threatens the security of this country that we will elect a Democratic president and Americans will unite against his hatred,” she said.

The Hill was the first to report in May that Democrats were discussing dropping Wasserman Schultz before the party’s national convention in July.

“There have been a lot of meetings over the past 48 hours about what color plate do we deliver Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s head on,” one pro-Clinton Democratic senator told The Hill at the time.

She added that the DNC does not view Clinton as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, despite the fact that she’s eclipsed the delegate threshold to secure the nomination.

“Today is the day of our last primary, and polls have not closed. We are not presuming anything other than we are going to do everything we can to ensure Donald Trump never gets anywhere near the White House,” she said.

“We are certainly not going to declare anyone the presumptive nominee before the last votes are cast later today [in Washington, D.C.].”

Tags Bernie Sanders Donald Trump Hillary Clinton