It appears increasingly likely that the 2020 Democratic primary field will be the most wide open in recent memory, and perhaps in the history of American politics.
The Daily Beast spoke with opposition researchers and operatives in both parties to get a sense of what could prove helpful and harmful for candidates. These are the individuals whose job it is to understand and exploit the vulnerabilities of those running for office. All of them cautioned that their perspectives were not the same as predictions. But they still had insights to share, which The Daily Beast will be presenting in a multi-part series. Today, we look at Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) who has become a leading Democratic voice in the Senate, a leading advocate for sexual assault victims, but also a bit of a political mystery, owing to her more conservative-leaning past.
Kirsten Gillibrand
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Kirsten Gillibrand has been a strident advocate for women while serving in the Senate, taking the lead on sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military. She has also shifted from her more centrist roots into becoming an unapologetic progressive.
That doesn’t make her demonstrably different from other potential candidates in the field. What does, Democrats say, has been her willingness to criticize members of her own party. Those who’ve been rebuked include Bill Clinton, who Gillibrand recently said should have resigned from office given his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), whom Gillibrand called on to resign when stories surfaced that he had been accused of unwanted touching and groping.
That latter decision has made the New York Democrat a unique voice within her party. But it hasn’t come without blowback. Democrats say that the animus to Gillibrand over her handling of the Franken saga is real, with some donors hesitant about supporting a possible presidential campaign.
Gillibrand seems to have made up the deficit with help from small-dollar donors. “For every one person who shares a concern with me, I have at least one person thanking me, and it tends to be young women who come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to me that you stood up and did the right thing,’” Gillibrand recently told The Atlantic. But Democratic officials say that they expect Gillibrand to continue to be dogged by the issue should she choose to run—for better or for worse.
That won’t be the only hurdle Gillibrand has to clear, should she choose to run. Opposition researchers for other campaigns will have an easy time surfacing past votes the Senate made when she was a Blue Dog Democrat in the House of Representatives. And it’s not just votes. In 2009, Gillibrand said that she slept with two guns under her bed for purposes of protecting her family from a home invasion. The comment drew rebukes from gun control advocates, who also feared the senator’s long-standing support from the NRA. During a “60 Minutes” interview from early 2018, Gillibrand said that she was “embarrassed” about the fact that she previously had an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association and hadn’t seen firsthand the effect of gun violence on families until she entered the Senate.
Gillibrand has also had some prior, harsher immigration stances too, namely being against sanctuary cities and amnesty. Of those, she’s recently said : “I came from a district that was 98 percent white. We have immigrants, but not a lot of immigrants... And I just didn't take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn't right in front of me. And that was my fault. It was something that I'm embarrassed about and I'm ashamed of.”
These previous policy positions will undoubtedly come up in a Democratic primary. So too will Gillibrand’s past, cozier relationship with Wall Street. The senator, like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), has had some top finance executives as major donors to her campaign, in part because of the state she represents. But she has sought to diminish any concerns about friendliness with the financial industry by swearing off corporate PAC money in early 2018.
“I think Booker and Gillibrand are cut from the same cloth in many ways but are going to face the same liberal critiques,” one researcher told The Daily Beast.
That critique bubbled up briefly this past week following a CNBC report alleging that the senator had been gauging interest from Wall Street executives about backing a prospective run. Gillibrand later tweeted a response to the story that noted her record without confirming or denying the facts of the report.
Tomorrow, we talk to oppo researchers about the strengths and weaknesses of the rest of the Democratic field, including some of the self-funders whose personal wealth could help them morph from long shots to contenders.
