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2020 Election - Democratic Primaries

The 2020 election was expected to produce a bumper crop of Democratic presidential contenders seeking their party's nomination. A shadow campaign for the 2020 nomination shaped up in early-nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Most of the names are unfamiliar. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., visited Iowa in early September 2017. Jason Kander, the former Missouri secretary of state who was viewed as a rising star, recruited a Sanders aide to stake work in Iowa, and announced plans to open offices for his voting-rights group in five states. The Iowa Steak Fry, previously led by former Senator Tom Harkin, is a rite of passage for Democratic presidential contenders. It drew Ryan, Bustos and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts in September 2017. Mike Allen's conversations with well-wired Democrats produced a list of three dozen names that ranged from possible to plausible to probable.

Because so many people want to be the party's candidate in 2020, the first two debates were split over the course of two nights. But the September field was limited to just 10 candidates. Besides Gillibrand, Senator Michael Bennet, Montana Governor Steve Bullock, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, billionaire Tom Steyer and self-help guru Marianne Williamson failed to achieve the necessary 2% support in four polls and donations from 130,000 people.

As of 04 March 2019, there were 581 candidates who had filed to run with the FEC. /p>

As of 04 March 2020, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has consolidated from a once-crowded field with more than 20 candidates into essentially a two-man contest after robust results Tuesday for former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Biden won nine states, including the delegate-rich state of Texas where his victory was a surprise after early national polls showed Sanders with a commanding lead there. He was strong across the South, also capturing Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arkansas, along with Minnesota and Massachusetts. Sanders took the state with the most delegates, California, as well as Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont. In Alabama, Maine and North Carolina, voters said their overwhelming feeling about the presidential race is that they are angry at Trump, not just dissatisfied with his performance.

2020 Election - Democratic Primary Candidates

  1. Sen. Michael Bennet dropped out 11 Fbruary 2020 after the New Hampshire primary. Bennetjoined the fray 02 May 2019, at least the 19th candidate, depending on who’s counted, and the seventh U.S. senator in the race. Bennett of Colorado is a mild-mannered lawmaker who speaks with an air of pragmatic optimism. Bennet is pitching himself as a pragmatic lawmaker who has a progressive voting record but who also knows what it takes to win in an electorally split state such as Colorado. He leans heavily on his education roots -- he was the superintendent of Denver Public Schools before joining the Senate in 2009. Amid the news that Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, he still planned to run for president, as he was cancer-free after his treatment.
  2. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, after months of public hints that filled New Yorkers with dread, Bill de Blasio finally announced his candidacy 16 May 2019. The New York City Mayor had an op-end in The Washington Post on 15 January 2019 titled : "Yes, Democrats Can Deliver on Big, Progressive Ideas,” in which the mayor ran through his accomplishments, knocked his detractors, bashed moderates by name for urging Democrats to trim their progressive sails, and urged liberals to “refuse to listen to what centrists tell us is realistic.” De Blasio remained plagued by consistent local approval ratings in the low 40s. But in a party that prizes diversity, he can point to his multiracial family. De Blasio quit the race on 20 September 2019, reducing the pack to 19 candidates. But opinion polls show that three of those candidates are pulling well ahead of their rivals.

  3. Billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the race to become the Democratic Party's presidential nominee on 03 March 2020, after a weak showing in the 14 states that held primaries on Super Tuesday. Bloomberg won American Samoa, the U.S. territory, gaining five of its six delegates, while picking up three more delegates in Colorado and one in Arkansas. He reportedly spent $600 million of his vast $55 billion fortune on TV and social media campaign ads and built a staff seemingly overnight on the ground in each state. He tapped into local mayors and community groups for support.

    Bloomberg was initially working on entering at least one Democratic presidential primary and potentially the overall race for the chance to take on Trump, the New York Times reported 07 November 2019. A source close to Bloomberg told NBC News "Mike believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. In 2016, he spoke out at the Democratic Convention, warning against a Trump presidency. ... We now need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated – but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that." Bloomberg re-registered as a Democrat amid speculation that he will run. Bloomberg rejoined the Democratic Party on 11 October 2018, signaling an interest in running as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. The announcement came as the billionaire media mogul has emerged as a top financial backer of the Democratic Party during the pivotal 2018 midterm congressional races, pledging nearly $100 million to Democratic candidates and causes. Bloomberg was a long-time Democrat until 2001 when he changed his party affiliation to run as a Republican candidate for mayor of New York . He won the race and served as a popular mayor of America’s largest city until 2014.

    While in City Hall in New York, Bloomberg, who registered as an independent in 2007, was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008. In 2016, he toyed with the idea of running as an independent presidential candidate. A moderate on social issues, Bloomberg supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage and tighter gun laws. His non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund super PAC, Independence USA PAC, has spent millions of dollars during the current election cycle supporting Democratic candidates and opposing Republicans running as gun rights advocates. Bloomberg, with a net worth of more than $40 billion, is one of the wealthiest of Americans, his fortune in part stemming from the widespread use of what many in high finance and media circles know as the "Bloomberg machine," a vast and costly collection of financial data about companies and economies from across the globe. According to U.S. news accounts, Bloomberg has told associates he would be willing to spend $1 billion of his own fortune on a campaign. To critics, Bloomberg is a soda-taxing, gun-grabbing, snack-attacking control freak. Bloomberg is a notorious control freak, who announced 05 March 2019 he would not run for President, fortunately.

  4. Sen. Cory Booker (NJ), dropped out of the presidential race 12 January 2020, ending a campaign whose message of unity and love failed to resonate in a political era marked by chaos and anxiety. Booker was a finalist for vice president on Hillary Clinton's 2016 ticket. Booker is frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Both the Washington Post and National Journal list him among their top 10 contenders. Booker is doing his best to attract supporters of Bernie Sanders. By April 2019 he had raised over $5 million in the two months since he entered the 2020 primary, and has over $6.1 million cash on hand. The sum puts him near the back of the pack in fundraising. “Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win -- money we don't have, and money that is harder to raise because I won't be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington,” he said. It's a humbling finish for someone who was once lauded by Oprah Winfrey as the “rock star mayor” who helped lead the renewal of Newark, New Jersey. Booker was known for his headline-grabbing feats of local do-goodery, including running into a burning building to save a woman, and his early fluency with social media, which brought him 1.4 million followers on Twitter when the platform was little used in politics. He was among the first candidates to release a gun control plan, and at the time it was the most ambitious in the field, as it included a gun licensing program that would have been seen as political suicide just a decade before.

  5. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (BOO'-tah-juhj) dropped out of the presidential race on 02 March 2020. Mayor Pete joined the 2020 presidential race on 23 January 2019. Buttigieg, 37, touted his work to improve his city of 100,000 residents. He said Democrats could benefit from a new generation of leaders as they try to unseat President Donald Trump in 2020. Buttigieg is a Rhodes scholar who was first elected mayor of his hometown in 2011 at age 29 — making him the youngest mayor at the time of a U.S. city with at least 100,000 residents. A lieutenant in the Navy Reserve, he served a tour in Afghanistan in 2014. Buttigieg raised his national profile with an unsuccessful 2017 run for Democratic National Committee chairman. During his campaign for a second term, Buttigieg came out as gay. He went on to win re-election with 80 percent of the vote.

    At one time, it was conventional wisdom that the surest way to end a political career was for a politician to be caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman. In the 1960s, Nelson Rockefeller was widely considered to be ineligible for the Presidency, having divorced his first wife. In 2018, Mayor Pete married his husband, middle school teacher Chasten Glezman. According to NBC News, a majority of Americans say they’re just fine with a gay candidate. A combined 68 percent are either enthusiastic (14 percent) or comfortable (54 percent) with a candidate who is gay or lesbian.

    As recently as 2006, when Buttigieg was 24 years old, more than half of Americans said they would be “very uncomfortable” (34 percent) or have “reservations” (19 percent) about a gay or lesbian person running for president. That year, just five percent said they’d be enthusiastic about an LGBT candidate, according to an NBC/WSJ poll. An additional 38 percent said they’d be “comfortable.” The jump isn’t just due to increasing tolerance among the younger voters who Buttigieg, a millennial, can claim to represent. The share of those under 35 who say they’re enthusiastic or comfortable with a gay candidate increased by 28 percentage points between 2006 and now, jumping from 47 percent to 75 percent now. And, while seniors are more likely to voice reservations about gay candidates, a majority (56 percent) now say they have no objections. That’s up from just 31 percent in 2006.

    Buttigieg has struggled to gain support from minority voters. In a Washington Post/Ipsos poll of African American voters taken in January 2020, he had the highest unfavorable rating among the candidates. The same poll showed 40% of African American respondents saying they are reluctant to vote for a gay man. Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Americans are “still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage [as] president.”

    The Bradley effect (less commonly the Wilder effect) is the pressure people feeel to provide pollsters an answer that is deemed to be more publicly acceptable, or 'politically correct'. This social desirability bias leads some voters to give inaccurate polling responses for fear that, by stating their true preference, they will open themselves to criticism of biased motivation. The 1983 race in Chicago featured a black candidate, Harold Washington, running against a white candidate. Two polls conducted approximately two weeks before the election showed Washington with a 14-point lead in the race. But in the election's final results, Washington won by less than four points. In the 1989 race for Governor of Virginia between Democrat Doug Wilder, an African-American, and Republican Marshall Coleman, who was white, Wilder prevailed, but by less than half of one percent, when pre-election poll numbers showed him on average with a 9 percent lead.

  6. Julian Castro, a Texas Democrat and former US secretary of housing and urban development, announced on 02 January 2020 that he "suspends" his campaign for president. Castro, 44, told Rolling Stone. "I have a strong vision for the country. ... I'll make a final decision after November." He announced his 2020 Presidential run on 12 January 2019. Julian Castro was elected mayor of San Antonio, Texas in 2009 and served until 2014. He served as the 16th US secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under US President Barack Obama from 2014 until 2017. He ended his presidential bid in January, saying in a video: "I've determined that it simply isn't our time." He said he wasn't done fighting. "I'll keep working towards a nation where everyone counts, a nation where everyone can get a good job, good health care and a decent place to live." Castro made the debate stage for the first four events, but failed to qualify for the fifth and sixth debates.

  7. John Delaney, a three-term Democrat congressman from Maryland, threw his hat into the ring in September 2017. He was the first Democrat to formally declare a run for the party's 2020 presidential nomination, but at the end of January 2020 he said he was dropping out of the race. Delaney, 54, the son of an electrician whose business career has made him one of the wealthiest members of Congress, who has moved first. He has announced that he was not seeking a fourth term in Congress, instead devoting time and money to his White House campaign. Delaney pitch is unashamedly moderate, this could prove to be a weakness at a time when some Democrats have buyer's remorse at having opted for Hillary Clinton rather than Bernie Sanders.

  8. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, has drawn heavy speculation. She appears to be another Manchurian Candidate. “Several experts who track websites and social media linked to the Kremlin have also seen what they believe may be the first stirrings of an upcoming Russian campaign of support for Gabbard,” from NBC article 'Russia's propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard'. On 19 March 2020 Gabbard said she was dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary race and will support former Vice President Joe Biden. After 25 state primary contests, Biden has opened up a nearly insurmountable lead by capturing 1,180 delegates on the road to the 1,191 needed to clinch the party nomination. Sanders has secured 885 delegates while Gabbard has won only two. "Today I am suspending my presidential campaign and offering my full support to vice president Joe Biden in his quest to bring our country together," Gabbard said in a statement.

  9. Senator Kamala Harris, California’s junior senator, on 03 December 2019 announced she is suspending her 2020 presidential campaign. "In good faith, I can’t tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward [to the Democratic presidential nomination] if I don’t believe I do," Harris said in a statement. Harris announced 21 January 2019 she is seeking the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination. Harris, a daughter of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, portrayed herself as a fighter for justice, decency and equality First-term Senator Harris saw her stature rise thanks to her high-profile opposition to the White House during congressional hearings. She could get another boost in a bid for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 election when California voted to move forward its primary election, to March from June, which could give Harris the potential to land a huge haul of early delegates. But as California's former top cop, Harris declined to prosecute bankers, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, for their role in the 2008 financial crisis. She also spent part of her summer raising cash in the tony precincts of the Hamptons. As a result, Sanders allies say she's a Wall Street shill.

  10. Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, has a decades-long interest in political solutions to climate change. Inslee has been in politics for a quarter century but has never become a national figure. Democratic voters in the early-primary states of New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina say that they care more about climate change and health care than any other issues. Inslee won a seat in the state legislature, in 1988, and Congress, in 1992—just in time to vote for the assault-weapons ban and lose his seat in the Gingrich revolution of 1994. Inslee, who became governor in 2013, tends toward the pragmatic. He dropped out of the race on 21 august 219, and had kept the option of running for a third term as governor open throughout his presidential campaign but didn't immediately say what his political plans were.

  11. Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar (MN) dropped out of the presidential race on 02 March 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden. Super-Tuesday polls showed Biden leading in seven states, Sanders in six, and Klobuchar ahead in her home state. Klobuchar had been seen as a potential presidential aspirant virtually since the time she was elected the first woman to represent Minnesota in the United States Senate in 2006. Since then, she has been re-elected twice by more than 20 points in an otherwise purple state, arguably making her the most popular Democrat to hold statewide office. She’s carried rural and Republican-leaning areas, her argument will go, with a pragmatic and hardworking approach. She polled well in neighboring Iowa, finishing fourth among possible Democratic candidates in late 2018. But Huffington Post reported that at least three people withdrew from consideration to lead the senator’s campaign — in part because of Klobuchar’s history of mistreating her staff. Klobuchar has an unrivaled command of details, puts in long, enthusiastic hours, and demands that her office meet those same high standards. Klobuchar’s rate of turnover ranked No. 1 in an analysis of all Senate staff salaries between 2001 and 2016, conducted by LegiStorm. During the 2015-16 session of Congress, she ranked first among all 100 senators for the number of bills signed into law. In 2018, Klobuchar carried 43 Minnesota counties that Trump had won two years earlier.

  12. Richard Ojeda (pronounced oh-JED-uh), a West Virginia Democrat who just lost the race to represent West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District and voted for Trump, was the latest candidate to say he will try to run against President Donald Trump. Ojeda, a 48-year-old retired Army major and state senator, helped lead teachers strikes in West Virginia earlier in 2018. Ojeda (D) ended his 2020 presidential campaign 26 January 2019, saying it would be difficult to continue to ask people to donate to a campaign with little chance of success.
  13. Robert Francis "Beto" O’Rourke, a 46-year-old democratic congressman dropped out of the crowded 2020 U.S. presidential race on 01 November 2019, saying it had become clear his campaign did not have the resources to continue to seek his party's nomination. Beto O'Rourke announced 14 March 2019 he was joining the race for the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2020 presidential election. He released a video message pledging a positive campaign that embraces the opportunity of facing challenges at what he called a "moment of maximum peril and maximum potential." O'Rourke fell short in his bid to unseat the incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz in the deep red state in the 06 November 2018 mid-term elections. Driven by a record-setting war chest of $70 million in donations, many of them contributions of $25 or less, shouts of “Beto 2020!” filled the air in El Paso’s 7,000 seat-capacity baseball stadium, after their underdog candidate for U.S. Senate — Beto O’Rourke — had already lost the race. “To build a campaign like this one solely comprised of people from all walks of life, coming together, deciding what unites us is far stronger than the color of our skin, how many generations we can count ourselves an American, or whether we just got here yesterday, who we love, we pray to, whether we pray at all, who we voted for last time, none of it matters,” O’Rourke said. O’Rourke could probably best be described as a moderate Democrat. O’Rourke voted with President Trump roughly 30% of the time, so he cannot be considered a left Democrat. O'Rourke and Biden have many stylistic differences, but their shared political identities could put them in direct competition for moderate voters. Progressive criticism ranged from O’Rourke’s membership in the centrist New Democrat Coalition to his acceptance of campaign money from oil industry employees. Defenders point to his support for Medicare for All and for leftist drug, military and immigration policies.

  14. Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick dropped out of the race on 12 February 2020, a day after the New Hampshire primary. In November 2019 he said he was seeking the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination despite an already crowded race, in an effort to bring a divided country - and splintering political party - together. Patrick, a 63-year-old African American and close ally of former President Barack Obama, said he respected the field of nearly 20 Democrats seeking to challenge Trump in next November's election. But he said he was concerned there was too much focus on either nostalgia for the way things used to be done or insisting that big ideas were the only path ahead. In a campaign video announcing his bid, Patrick cited anxiety and anger among Americans who feel their government and the economy has let them down. He said he was determined "to build a better, more sustainable, more inclusive American dream for the next generation". "This time is about the character of the country," he said in the video. "This time is more than removing an unpopular and divisive leader, as important as that is, but about delivering instead for you." He entered the race too late to qualify for the November debate.

  15. Tim Ryan, a US Representative and moderate Ohio Democrat, who promoted his appeal to working-class voters who left the party in 2016, announced 04 April 2019 that he will enter the 2020 presidential race. Ryan, 45, made an unsuccessful bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader in 2016. The politician had served in Congress since 2003 and, before that, spent two years in the Ohio State Senate. Ryan announced 24 October 2019 his withdrawal from presidential race. The politician was unable to fulfill the conditions for participating in the national television debates of the other candidates from the Democratic Party in September and October. The congressional’s voluntary donations in the second quarter of this year amounted to only $ 889 thousand. A number of his party members rivals scored tens of millions of dollars for the same purpose.

  16. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who saw his once strong lead in the Democratic primary evaporate as the party’s establishment lined swiftly up behind rival Joe Biden, ended his presidential bid on 08 April 2020, an acknowledgment that the former vice president was too far ahead for him to have any reasonable hope of catching up. Sanders was at the top of the Washington Post list in March 2018. On 19 February 2019 Sanders announced he was joining the race. Sanders, a frequent critic of Trump, said Trump was "the most dangerous president in modern American history." Sanders added: "We are running against a president who is a pathological liar, a fraud, a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe and someone who is undermining American democracy as he leads us in an authoritarian direction." In 2016, Sanders argued that Democrats could assemble a cross-ethnic and cross-class coalition by offering big universal public programs like Medicare-for-all and free college tuition. Sanders looked set to run again, and occupied much of the same political turf estate as Elizabeth Warren. The 77-year-old gained a strong following with plans to make college tuition free and for the government to greatly expand its role in providing health care to Americans. Sanders has been ranked among the leaders in opinion polls of prospective 2020 candidates, but he faces challenges from a large pool of other progressives who advocate for many of the same issues that he brought into the party's mainstream. He faced questions about his age and his relevance in a party that is represented by a growing number of women and minorities, groups that Sanders struggled to win over in 2016.

    Sanders had a long history of criticizing U.S. foreign policy while praising communist adversaries. In the 1980s he aligned with the Socialist Workers Party that was calling for “solidarity” with Iran while it was holding American hostages, and for communist Cuba. He also praised the investment in culture and mass transit in the Soviet Union while visiting the country in 1998. As a candidate for president, Sanders' foreign policy positions reflect his long standing views that American foreign interventions from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, have not succeeded to deter foreign aggression, to support democracy abroad, and to root out the threat of terrorism.

    Sanders initially exceeded sky-high expectations about his ability to recreate the magic of his 2016 presidential bid, and even overcame a heart attack in October 2019 on the campaign trail. But he found himself unable to convert unwavering support from progressives into a viable path to the nomination amid “electability” fears fueled by questions about whether his democratic socialist ideology would be palatable to general election voters. Many moderates warned that his proposed policies are too extreme, and could bring about a Republican landslide, ensuring both U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection and possibly losing Democratic control of the House of Representatives, if he were to become the Democratic nominee.

  17. Joe Sestak, on 01 December 2019 announced he was suspending his 2020 presidential campaign. Sestak, a retired Navy admiral and former Pennsylvania congressman announced his candidacy on 2 June 2019. He said he postponed announcing his candidacy to care for a daughter ill with brain cancer. Sestak was also part of former U.S. President Bill Clinton's national security team, holds a doctorate in government from Harvard, and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate twice. He embraces many positions popular with liberals, including abortion rights, gun control, and backs the nuclear deal with Iran.
  18. Tom Steyer, dropped out of the race to be the Democratic nominee in the U.S. presidential election on 29 February 2020. Despite spending $150 million on ads in early states and $253 million on his campaign in total, Steyer failed to earn any delegates at all or break more than 4% of the vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Nevada. The San Francisco progressive billionaire not only waged an eight-figure campaign to get Trump impeached; he's also trying to mobilize an army of progressive millennials to vote in the 2018 midterms. Steyer, an investor turned activist who's worth $1.6 billion according to Forbes, ran the voter drive under the umbrella of his political operation, NextGen America. Steyer announced on July 9 he was joining the Democratic presidential field after initially saying he would not run to focus his attention on impeaching Trump and getting fellow Democrats elected to Congress. "There's a breakdown in Washington DC, and I don't mean just Donald Trump," Steyer tweeted in a thread announcing his candidacy. "I'm talking about corporate money and our broken political system." The 62-year-old is one of the most visible and deep-pocketed liberals advocating for Trump's impeachment. But he has previously said he has grown frustrated at the pace at which the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is approaching Trump. His announcement made no mention of impeachment issue, instead focusing on why he believes there is a need to reduce the influence of corporations in politics. He also said he plans to target climate change, which is the focus of the Steyer-backed advocacy group NextGen America.

  19. California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell announced at a press conference 08 July 2019 that he was ending his short-lived bid for president and running for reelection to his House seat, becoming the second Democrat to drop out of the 2020 race, leaving the field at 23 candidates. “After the first Democratic presidential debate, our polling and fundraising numbers weren’t what we had hoped for, and I no longer see a path forward to the nomination. My presidential campaign ends today,” Swalwell said. Swalwell is best known for his position on the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee and his work on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
  20. Senator Elizabeth Warren ended her bid for the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination on 05 March 2020 after across-the-board losses in the 14 states that held party nominating elections on Super Tuesday, including a devastating third-place finish in her home state. A year earlier, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, the former Harvard Law School professor and consumer advocate, was the presumptive front-runner. The DNC blueprint, dubbed "A Better Deal," had Warren's fingerprints all over it, calling for a national $15-per-hour minimum wage and cheaper drugs, colleges and child care. Warren announced that she is entering the 2020 presidential race on 31 December. She notified her supporters that she has formed an exploratory committee thus kickstarting her fund raising campaign. "I've spent my career getting to the bottom of why America's promise works for some families, but others, who work just as hard, slip through the cracks into disaster and what I've found is terrifying: these aren't cracks that families are falling into, they're traps", she stated.

    An investigation by the Boston Herald revealed that Harvard Law School listed her as Native American in its federal affirmative action forms from 1995 to 2004. Further inquiries demonstrated that she also claimed Native American ancestry while working at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and identified herself as "American Indian" on a Texas bar registration card in 1986. An expansive Boston Globe investigation in September 2018 appeared to confirm that Warren did not benefit from the claims she made about her ancestry.

    On 14 February 2018 she delivered a well-crafted speech about her claim to Native American heritage that took direct aim at Trump for his “Pocahontas” nickname. Trump repeatedly called Warren by that name during his successful campaign for the presidency, saying she had lied about her genealogy. Warren, in the past, had said her mother was “part Cherokee and part Delaware,” but acknowledged no documentation for her lineage. A DNA test that proved claims by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren that she has Native ancestry. The October 2018 report by Stanford University biochemist Carlos Bustamante concluded that Warren has largely European ancestry, but "strongly support the existence of" a Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago.

    Warren grew up in Oklahoma, the state with the highest percent of Native Americans in the nation and one where the Cherokee are the largest minority group. The Cherokee Nation's refutation of the senator's claim is also not as honest and straightforward as it first appears.

    The New York Times wrote "... the arc of the Warren candidacy is the story of her cornering an upscale demographic early, only to become confined to it, and then lose her grip on it". The Times called that upscale demographic the "wine track" of Democratic politics: white, affluent and college-educated voters, especially women.

  21. Marianne Williamson (D), an self-help author and lecturer, announced she was running for president on January 28, 2019. "We need a fundamental disruption of a sociopathic economic order and an alignment of our politics with our deepest democratic and human values." She has become a regular guest on the Oprah Winfrey Network. She is also advocating for the United States to pay reparations for slavery, in the form of $100 billion to be disbursed for educational and economic projects determined by a council of African-American leaders. The self-help guru dropped out of the race in January. "I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now," Williamson said in a statement. Williamson qualified for the first two debates, but failed to do so in September, October, November and December.

  22. Andrew Yang (D), an entrepreneur and author from New York, dropped out 11 Fbruary 2020 after the New Hampshire primary. "I am the math guy, and it is clear to me from the numbers that we are not going to win this race," Yang said in front of a crowd of supporters as votes in New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary were being counted. filed to run for president on November 6, 2017. Yang quit his job at a big law firm and began to work in the tech industry. He helped to build a test-prep business that was bought by Kaplan in 2009 and later started the nonprofit organization Venture for America that connects recent college graduates with start-up businesses. Yang has called for enacting a universal basic income that would simply have the government send a $1,000 check to most Americans every month.

    Dropped from First Democratic Candidate debate

    Democratic National Committee dropped from the first debates on June 26 and 27, by failing by to register 1 percent support in three polls, receive donations from 65,000 people, or both. To qualify for the party’s third debate, scheduled for mid-September, candidates will have to attract donations from 130,000 individuals and register at least 2 percent in four state or national polls

    1. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock on 02 December 2019 announced he was suspending his 2020 presidential campaign. Bullock joined the race 14 May 2019 as the only candidate for President who’s actually won a Trump state. In 2016, he won his second gubernatorial term with 50 percent of the vote, 15 points more than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Bullock won reelection by four percentage points in 2016 even as Trump was carrying his state by 21. Bullock's main problem is that he's too moderate at a time when the party seems anxious for something further to the left - the familiar problem of someone who might win the general election, but would have a hard time getting the nomination. According to a Morning Consult poll released last week, 54 percent of potential Democratic primary voters nationwide had never heard of Bullock,
    2. Mike Gravel was a Democratic senator from Alaska from 1969-1981. Gravel’s political career included a fervently anti-war 2008 presidential bid and, in 1971, entering thousands of pages of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record. Gravel is trying to meme his way to the nomination after three teens convinced him to give it a go. Progressive candidate Mike Gravel was left out of several national polling surveys, therefore not even getting the chance to meet the DNC's minimum polling threshold for entering the debates.
    3. Wayne Messam, mayor of Miramar, a South Florida city near Miami, an unknown figure in the Democratic party, announced his candidacy 13 March 2019. Messam is a first-generation American - his parents immigrated from Jamaica and moved to Florida. Before politics, Messam started a construction company. In 2011, he was elected to the Miramar City Commission. And in 2015, he was elected as the city's first black mayor, leading the city of 140,000 people. Messam said he would fight hard for a progressive agenda that includes tackling gun-control laws, climate change, healthcare costs and student loan debt. Messam struggled to gain attention, having reached the 1 percent threshold in only one poll.





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