Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is not getting the nomination. She’s not going to be the next president of the United States. She hasn’t gained any ground in the course of four debates—and some members of her former staff know it. She’s a New York liberal who no one has heard of past the Catskill Mountains up until recently and even then, I doubt many knew of her that could buoy her presidential hopes. Former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders are the top three—the ones with at least some vestige of a national constituency, especially Sanders and Biden. Gillibrand has that bus tour she took in the rural parts of New York as her claim to why she could beat Trump or something. If you felt that was weak sauce, you’d be right. She’s also failed to advance to the Democratic debate next month (via NBC News):
In a blow to their hopes of making the debate stage next month, billionaire Tom Steyer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and a number of other presidential candidates missed a chance to advance in a new poll on Monday, just two days before the cutoff.
Ten candidates have already qualified for the ABC-sponsored Democratic debate in Houston in September, but Steyer, Gillibrand, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and author Marianne Williamson were hoping some last-minute surveys would push them across the threshold.
Now they'll have to hope that new polls come out before Wednesday — a tall order, especially considering that pollsters often avoid surveying Americans in August, when many people are on vacation.
Candidates need four polls showing them at 2 percent or higher and 130,000 unique donors.
Yeah, this isn’t happening. It’s time to pack it up, says former staffers of the New York Democrat. And they made that aspect known sort of brutally—noting that no one wants to see her on the debate stage. I mean when you look at the numbers, they’re not wrong. This is tough love, maybe (via NY Post):
It’s time for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s sputtering presidential campaign to call it quits, a friend of hers and two former aides told The Post.
“It would be best if she decided that this was not her time,” said one longtime Gillibrand fundraiser, who claimed the Democratic contender’s well-heeled supporters want her to remain in the US Senate.
[…]
“I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious,” said a former senior staffer in Gillibrand’s Senate office.
“She comes across as an opportunist to the public. I think that’s the biggest problem,” said the staffer, who criticized the candidate’s flip-flopping on guns and immigration. “I think she’ll have to seriously evaluate her campaign and her candidacy if she doesn’t make this debate.”
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Well, that time has arrived. It’s now up to the senator to decide whether it’s time to close shop.
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