Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 presidential campaign

Vox writers are making the best case for the leading Democratic candidates. This article is the sixth in the series. Read them all here. Vox does not endorse individual candidates.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination on March 2 to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, despite a last-minute surge in the polls and a surprisingly strong performance in New Hampshire, has dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. She will endorse former Vice President Joe Biden during an event in Dallas on Monday, a campaign spokesperson told Vox.

Following a sluggish start, Klobuchar ultimately established herself as a prominent moderate in the race who occupied a similar lane to Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (who also dropped out after the South Carolina primary). She lagged a number of other competitors for the majority of the primary campaign but picked up momentum in recent weeks after a series of strong debate showings — and a third place finish in New Hampshire.

As a trailblazing woman in public life, a lot has been asked of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the past four decades. She’s been forced to play the role of supportive wife and smile through humiliation. She’s been held to a higher standard than most men in office, enduring marathon sessions in front of hostile congressional panels for dubious reasons. She’s had to hide her ambitions while she ran for office, then turn around and give a gracious concession speech after a man (who won on sexist and racist tropes) got to be president despite earning fewer votes.

Through all the indignities that come with being a woman in politics, she’s put her principles and her party first. It’s understandable that Clinton might have had enough, that she might think she has nothing left to give to the cause of women’s rights as human rights, or that she can’t help but take one more whack at the highest glass ceiling left for women in America.

The Klobmentum is real.

At least, that’s one narrative coming out of the New Hampshire primary, where the senator made an impressive showing, coming in third behind Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg — and beating onetime frontrunners Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.

As a potential standard-bearer for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, Sen. Amy Klobuchar has a much stronger electability case than her rivals in the center lane. And her strong showing in the New Hampshire primary should be an opportunity for Democratic Party stakeholders to take that seriously.

She’s not an incredible dynamo of charisma, but she does have a kind of charming dorky Midwestern shtick. She sticks to popular policy positions, and she has a strong track record of winning the kind of voters Democrats need to carry in November.

DURHAM, New Hampshire — Staffers and surrogates from rival campaigns across the state aren’t happy about it, but they agree: The New Hampshire primary is Sen. Bernie Sanders’s race to lose.

Again and again in interviews in the final weeks of campaigning here, political insiders stumping for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Vice President Joe Biden told me they were prepared for a Sanders victory. Well before voting even starts, some fretted about how their candidate had campaigned here.

DOVER, New Hampshire — Newspaper editorial boards across America seem ready for a woman president. But voters aren’t so sure.

The New York Times recently endorsed both Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the two women left standing in the higher tiers of the 2020 Democratic primary. While the paper clearly couldn’t choose between Klobuchar’s pragmatic moderation and Warren’s sweeping “big structural change” stance, its choice of two women made a statement.

The Iowa caucuses are happening in a little less than two weeks, and they’re on a collision course with a certain event that’s keeping several top candidates stuck in Washington: President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

Three of the candidates polling in the top five in Iowa are sitting US senators — Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). And all three plus the lower-polling Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) will have to substantially curb their time on the campaign trail starting Tuesday.

Foreign policy dominated the opening section of Tuesday night’s presidential debate, and it allowed the six candidates onstage in Iowa to put some serious daylight between them on issues of war and trade.

Among other things, they debated how many troops to keep in the Middle East and whether they support the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal (USMCA) President Donald Trump negotiated.

At Tuesday’s seventh Democratic presidential primary debate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) went directly at the two leading progressive candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to make the case for a more “practical” health care reform agenda rather than pursuing Medicare-for-all.

The exchanges were, in some ways, a repeat of what’s been said in many debates before. Sanders and Warren argued the risk is not doing enough, given that America spends more money on health care than other developed countries but has worse outcomes. The moderates on the stage argued that Medicare-for-all is too expensive and risks angering Americans by moving them to a new government insurance plan.

CONWAY, New Hampshire — Moderate New Hampshire voters think Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar could beat President Donald Trump in a general election. They’re just not sure she can win the Democratic primary.

Coming off a strong December debate performance — and with fundraising and polling numbers good enough to be on the January debate stage — Klobuchar is getting a lot of interest from moderate voters in the Granite State. As she campaigns on her Midwestern appeal and ability to win over disaffected Trump voters in areas Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, voters here, especially those who are anxious about electability, are paying attention.

CNN’s climate crisis town hall on Wednesday night was an unprecedented seven hours of discussion on climate change with 10 of the Democratic 2020 presidential contenders. It was also the most substantive discussion of climate change policies ever broadcast on primetime television.

Each candidate was given a 40-minute segment, meaning they could provide long, nuanced answers to hard questions on the most far-reaching issue of our time. There was a lot that could have gone wrong, so it’s remarkable so much went right. The town hall easily outshone the muddled discussion in the paltry half-hour or so devoted to climate change across eight hours of official Democratic debates.

Days after a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which the gunman reportedly targeted Latinx people, Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar is releasing a plan for how she would use the presidency to fight hate crimes.

The plan, which was exclusively shared with Vox ahead of its release Thursday afternoon, calls for using federal resources to support marginalized communities targeted in acts of violence and for strengthening federal efforts to address domestic terrorism, particularly by white nationalists.

2020 Democratic candidates were surprisingly critical of the Iran nuclear deal during the first presidential debate.

Signed by the Obama administration in 2015, the accord between Iran, the US, European powers, Russia, and China put tight restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The Obama administration’s goal was to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon diplomatically instead of by force.

In her 12 years as Minnesota senator, Amy Klobuchar has worked to build a reputation as a quick-witted, hardworking pragmatist: She bills herself as the “senator next door.” Since February, she’s been trying to pitch that persona on the campaign trail.

Klobuchar says she’s electable. At 58, she’s on her third term in the Senate — elections she’s won by landslide margins. She won reelection in 2018 by a whopping 26 points over Republican opponent Jim Newberger, including in 43 counties that Donald Trump won in 2016.

Fox News’s live town hall with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on Wednesday night featured an interesting exchange where moderator Bret Baier tried to use Klobuchar’s support for her former colleague Al Franken, who resigned over sexual harassment allegations in December 2017, and her opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh against her:

Klobuchar did decline in December 2017 to call for Franken’s resignation — but she also stated when he resigned that he was doing the right thing, that his sexual harassment of others was wrong, and later that his “third act” might not necessarily be in politics. Her response to Baier was in that vein.

Before she joined the US Senate, Amy Klobuchar spent much of her career locking people up as the prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minnesota. But if she’s elected president, the Democrat has vowed to enact reforms within a month that could free thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people from federal prisons — and she won’t even need Congress to do it.

Klobuchar’s plan would tap into one of the president’s few nearly absolute powers: the ability to grant pardons and commutations to any federal prison inmate. This is the power that President Donald Trump used last year when, after meeting with Kim Kardashian West, he commuted the life sentence of Alice Johnson, a great-grandmother in prison for drug trafficking. It’s the power that Trump has reportedly considered for former staff caught in the Russia investigation.

It’s infrastructure week for Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign as the Minnesota Democrat rolls out a proposal for a $1 trillion infrastructure investment package.

If that number sounds familiar, you may recall that Donald Trump frequently promised an infrastructure plan on that scale during his 2016 campaign — one of several breaks with GOP policy orthodoxy that turned out not to amount to much once he won. Upon taking office, he repeatedly promised various plans, only to have his administration ultimately roll out a set of tax cut and privatization schemes that went nowhere in Congress.

Amy Klobuchar wants to be the next president of the United States. But like fellow Democratic candidate Kamala Harris before her, and perhaps Joe Biden in the future, she’s increasingly facing scrutiny from progressives over one part of her record: criminal justice.

Klobuchar, who’s currently a US senator from Minnesota, was previously a prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minnesota, which is home to Minneapolis and more than 1 million people. In her time as prosecutor from 1999 to 2007, she embraced “tough on crime” policies — pursuing harsher prison sentences against nonviolent offenders, such as graffiti taggers and drug dealers, and calling for changes to the law that would allow even longer prison sentences, particularly against repeat offenders.

On Friday afternoon, the New York Times dropped a long piece on Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar that started with an anecdote meant to indict her management style: She once ate a salad with a comb, then made the staffer who lost her fork wipe it off.

It’s the latest article in a series about how the senior Minnesotan senator is allegedly a bad boss. All of the pieces are based on accounts from anonymous former aides. No staffer has gone on the record. HuffPost and BuzzFeed ran the first stories, which included weird anecdotes like the time Klobuchar flung a binder into the air, hitting an innocent bystander. She sent a staffer an email late at night calling the attached policy brief “the worst,” a label she gave to someone else’s work the next week and the week after.

Amy Klobuchar isn’t here to join the progressive food fight.

Klobuchar, a three-term Minnesota senator who recently announced her bid for the presidency, firmly cleared up where she stands on progressive policy priorities, including Medicare-for-all and free college, during a CNN town hall on Monday.