The latest coverage of the 2020 presidential, House and Senate elections
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ nascent presidential campaign made a major staffing shuffle on Tuesday, with three of his top ad gurus from his 2016 campaign announcing they would not stay on for his 2020 run.
Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh in a joint statement cited a differing “creative vision” from the senator for their split.
Early state chairs lead effort to lay out norms and rules Democratic presidential campaigns should follow with regard to disinformation tactics.
Democratic Party chairs in the four early presidential states are working to convince the 2020 presidential candidates to avoid waging social media disinformation warfare against each other.
The effort began this week with a letter to state party chairs across the country broadly laying out the issue with an ultimate goal of establishing what amounts to a non-aggression pact, according to a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO.
Hillary Clinton said in an interview this week that the female candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination are unjustly facing the challenge of not looking "aggressive" or "angry" — and must instead take a "Goldilocks path" of looking just right.
“How does a woman stand up for herself on the biggest stage in the world without, No. 1, looking aggressive — maybe a little bit angry — that somebody is behaving like that, being willing to go toe-to-toe, when there are so few memories embedded in our collective DNA where women do that?” Clinton said in an interview on the podcast “TBD with Tina Brown.”
Sen. Cory Booker has won the first endorsement of an Iowa state lawmaker, nearly a year out from the presidential caucuses.
State Rep. Amy Nielsen, a former mayor of North Liberty, a town in Johnson County, announced Tuesday she is backing Booker (D-N.J.) for president, praising his work as mayor of Newark, N.J.
SAN FRANCISCO — In a show of force aimed at locking down support in California — an early primary state critical to her 2020 hopes — Sen. Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced the backing of a score of Democratic California statewide officers.
The Harris campaign Tuesday is set to announce the backing of Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, state Secretary of State Alex Padilla, State Treasurer Fiona Ma, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, POLITICO has learned.
A native Californian learns that Iowa is as nice as it's cracked up to be.
BUCKINGHAM, Iowa—Janet and Mike Shock reclined in loungers while trying to write the first sentence of this story.
Janet offered a literal interpretation of my misfortune: “Stranded in Buckingham, Iowa,” she said.
Progressive activists are pushing 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to commit to increasing the number of Supreme Court justices in order to dilute to current conservative majority.
The recently created, aptly named “Pack the Courts” told POLITICO it has raised more than $500,000 to jump-start its effort and has partnered with Demand Justice, a progressive group founded in 2018 that is trying to match Republicans' organizing efforts around the judiciary.
President Donald Trump lashed out at director Spike Lee on Monday, calling the filmmaker out after he used his Oscars acceptance speech Sunday night to urge viewers to vote against Trump and “be on the right side of history” in the 2020 election.
“Be nice if Spike Lee could read his notes, or better yet not have to use notes at all, when doing his racist hit on your President, who has done more for African Americans (Criminal Justice Reform, Lowest Unemployment numbers in History, Tax Cuts, etc.) than almost any other Pres!” Trump wrote in a tweet, listing accomplishments that his administration has claimed through two years in office.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Monday her campaign will shun fundraising through some of the old-fashioned means: dinners, donor calls and cocktail parties.
In an email to supporters Monday, Warren also said she won’t sell access to big-name donors as candidates often do to raise money for a presidential bid.
Their chief worries: How Trump can win again in Rust Belt states that swung to Democrats in the midterms. And the president’s lack of discipline.
Late last month, more than 100 major Republican donors gathered at the Trump International Hotel for a presentation from the president’s campaign manager Brad Parscale and other top political hands on their plans to keep the White House in 2020 after a brutal midterm election.
But several of the GOP contributors left the two-day retreat in Washington dissatisfied, dogged by essentially the same concern: The president doesn’t really have a strategy to win reelection.
Two leading Democratic presidential candidates weighed in Saturday on the escalating unrest in Venezuela. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris called on President Nicolás Maduro to refrain from violence against his own citizens.
Sanders said Venezuela was experiencing “a serious humanitarian crisis,” taking a tougher line against Maduro after previously drawing criticism from Florida Democrats for declining to call the South American strongman a dictator.
Both parties admit the next two years will largely be a fight to preserve the status quo and rally their bases on the divisive issue.
The Trump administration’s overhaul of a federal family planning program is opening a new front in the abortion wars on a divided Capitol Hill.
A rule the administration released Friday will effectively cut off tens of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood and other clinics that offer abortions, while steering some of that Title X federal funding toward anti-abortion, faith-based care providers. It’s not the all-out defunding of Planned Parenthood that the Republicans have long sought, but it’s unacceptable to Democrats with new authority over health care and federal spending.
The just-announced 2020 contender declines to say whether the socialist Venezuelan dictator should go.
Florida Democrats are denouncing Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for refusing to call Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro a dictator — a politically explosive issue in the nation’s biggest swing state.
Sanders also would not say whether he considered Venezuela’s assembly leader, Juan Guaidó, as the nation’s interim president, which is the position of the United States and a majority of Latin American countries and European countries.
The Maryland governor, weighing a White House bid, said he expects to visit New Hampshire in the next few months.
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said Thursday he expects to make a springtime trip to New Hampshire as he weighs a 2020 challenge to Donald Trump — and accused the Republican National Committee of going to extraordinary lengths to shield the president from a potentially draining primary.
“Typically they try to be fair arbiters of a process and I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been involved in the Republican Party for most of my life. It’s unprecedented. And in my opinion it’s not the way we should be going about our politics,” Hogan, a popular two-term Maryland governor, said in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s very undemocratic and to say, ‘We’re in some cases not going to allow a debate, we may not have a primary…’”
Miami is mounting a furious lobbying blitz to win over Dems.
MIAMI — Miami fears the fix is in.
Local Democrats increasingly believe that the Democratic National Convention in 2020 will be sited in Milwaukee, Wis., a conclusion that’s led Florida politicians, donors and insiders to mount a final lobbying blitz to turn the tide.
Bernie Sanders is more than halfway toward his goal of persuading 1 million people to sign onto a petition to support his presidential campaign, with 603,000 coming on board, according to his team.
The petition, a major part of his 2020 announcement rollout, gives the Vermont senator the opportunity to demonstrate his grassroots support in a crowded field of Democratic candidates — and build up his email list and base of donors and volunteers.
The campaign against Democrat Doug Jones is important insurance for Republicans seeking to protect their 53-47 majority in 2020.
Republicans landed a top-tier recruit Wednesday in a race critical to their hopes of holding the Senate in 2020, when GOP Rep. Bradley Byrne jumped into the campaign against the most vulnerable Democrat up for reelection, Alabama’s Doug Jones.
The Senate is clearly in play in two years: At least a half-dozen Republican incumbents are at risk, including two in states President Donald Trump lost in 2016, and Democrats have already begun to recruit challengers in several of those races. After his shocking special election win in 2017 in deeply conservative Alabama, defeating Jones is the GOP’s best opportunity to flip a Democratic-held seat — making the contest a vital insurance policy for the party to protect its majority, currently 53-47.
Kamala Harris made headlines last week when she joked in a radio interview that of course she smoked marijuana in her younger years: “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”
But the crack didn’t go over well with at least one Jamaican: Donald J. Harris, her father.
Sen. Kamala Harris is adding several women of color to her presidential campaign team, an aide told POLITICO.
Emmy Ruiz, a political strategist who served as Hillary Clinton’s state director in Nevada and Colorado in 2016, will be a senior adviser to Harris. Ruiz will counsel the campaign on electoral, political and field strategy.
A coordinated barrage of social media attacks suggests the involvement of foreign state actors.
A wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at Democratic 2020 candidates is already underway on social media, with signs that foreign state actors are driving at least some of the activity.
The main targets appear to be Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), four of the most prominent announced or prospective candidates for president.
