Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez said Tuesday the DNC was prepared for Republicans to lie, cheat, steal and suppress the vote to win the White House back in 2020.
Perez made his dire warning on MSNBC while discussing his public call on Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to "join me in condemning the weaponization of stolen private data in our electoral process." McDaniel has released a statement calling for American elections to be safeguarded and criticized the hack of DNC emails by the Russians in 2016, calling it an "affront to all of us."
Fill-in host Joy Reid fretted that President Donald Trump would engage in dissemination of stolen materials again, although the Robert Mueller report exonerated the campaign of conspiracy with the Russians.
"There's absolutely that danger," Perez said. "What's clear from this administration and frankly what's clear throughout the entirety of his business practices is that they will lie, cheat, and steal. They will do anything to win. They have so eroded institutions of democracy."
Perez said "our democracy is on the ballot" among other issues in 2020.
"We have to be prepared for more lying, cheating, and stealing, because they have an approach to undermining our democracy that is shameful, and that is why we are organizing everywhere, and that is why we are preparing for every eventuality," he said. "We won in 2018 across this country in historic manners, but I am very sober about the realities of the upcoming campaign.
"They will try to suppress the vote wherever they can. They will try to cheat, they will try to weaponize things. That's what we are preparing for at the DNC, and that is unfortunate. That's why our democracy is truly on the ballot, and I'm confident we can win, but it saddens me to no end, Joy, because this isn't who we are. This is not the party of Lincoln. The party of Lincoln has officially died. The party of Trump is not a party that represents our democratic values."