The Democratic establishment acccuses state chair Judith Whitmer of dividing the party. The democratic socialist leader says it's a "smear campaign."

A fierce power struggle has broken out over who will run the Democratic Party in Nevada, a pivotal 2024 battleground that last year determined the balance of the Senate.

And it’s getting ugly.

There are calls for the sitting chair’s resignation. There are accusations that Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer steered contracts to allies. Two sparring sides accuse each other of attempting to fracture the party.

And new documents obtained by NBC News display the depths of the divisions and how they played out in the run-up to one of the closest Senate races in the nation.

Whitmer, part of a slate of democratic socialists who took over the party in March 2021, now fights to hang on ahead of her March 4 re-election, where she faces a challenge from Nevada Assemblywoman Daniele Munroe-Moreno.

“They’re launching a smear campaign against me, personally,” Whitmer said in an interview with NBC News.

A central part of the drama over Whitmer's tenure has been the decision by a group of previous party leaders to, a few months after she took over, break off from her control and form a rival Democratic entity in Washoe County called Nevada Democratic Victory. It essentially became a shadow party apparatus with aides tied to more establishment Democrats in the state, including Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen.

Now, internal party documents obtained by NBC News outline just how heated that battle became and what steps the party structure controlled by Whitmer considered to get back at that faction.

The documents lay out a pressure campaign in advance of an ultimately abandoned plan to de-charter Washoe County Democrats from the state party, including a desire to hit back at the party's own senator despite a tight re-election race that was pivotal to Democratic control of the Senate that year.

“Unleash loyalists on CCM et al,” one of the list items read in the document, in an apparent reference to Cortez Masto.

The January 2022 document, titled "Washoe Week Timeline," itemized a day-by-day plan to mount a media relations campaign in an attempt to compel Washoe County Democrats to operate under the state party’s power structure. It also considered a legal avenue for de-chartering the group, which would have meant it would no longer have been affiliated with the state party and would have created hurdles to how Nevada Democratic Victory could raise and spend money.

“Themes for communications (i.e. Darn right we are protecting the Party existence from being taken by a rogue county committee, all efforts to work with elected officials failed because NDV & CCM told them not to even talk with us.),” the document stated. Then, ticking off names of elected officials, including then-governor Steve Sisolak, the notes stated, “Can we find 25 loyalists wrote email CCM, Sisolak, Ford, Yeager, Nicole about why are they are dividing the party.”

In the end, Whitmer’s group didn’t execute the plan. But the document exemplified the deep divisions within a party at war with itself and laid out tensions after the establishment lost its bid for chair to a slate of democratic socialists in 2021.

Both Whitmer and a party spokesman confirmed the documents but said they reflected a memorialization of a conversation with an attorney over possible ways to deal with an entity for which the party held liability but no oversight.

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