Amy Klobuchar Drops Out of Presidential Race and Endorses Biden

“Today I am ending my campaign and endorsing Joe Biden for president,” she said at a rally here for the former vice president. She added: “He can bring our country together and build that coalition of our fired-up Democratic base as well as independents and moderate Republicans. We do not in our party want to just eke by a victory. We want to win big.”

The decision comes one day after former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, departed the race, and after weeks of Democratic Party hand-wringing about a crowded field of moderate candidates splitting a finite field of centrist votes, allowing Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to march forward unopposed among progressives and amass delegates. Both Klobuchar and Buttigieg appeared with Biden at events in Dallas on Monday night and endorsed him.

Klobuchar began discussing a possible end with her campaign manager, Justin Buoen, on Sunday morning. But the candidate arrived at her final decision Monday morning, catching some staff members by surprise as they were still making plans for campaign events later this week and as her ad team was still making future reservations. Her rally in Salt Lake City on Monday morning carried no indication that she had any intention of dropping out of the race.

Her exit means that her home state is up for grabs Tuesday, as are its 75 pledged delegates. Sanders won Minnesota in 2016 and had been polling just a few percentage points behind Klobuchar there.

At the rally Monday night, Klobuchar turned to the dozens of television cameras and asked people “from my home state of Minnesota” to “vote for Joe.”

“Vote for decency, vote for dignity, vote for a heart for our country,” she said. “That is what he will bring to the White House.”

In a call with her staff Monday morning, Klobuchar said she was proud of her “happy, scrappy campaign.”

“I’ve been so proud that people have been willing to pitch in and help each other,” she said, according to an excerpt from the call. “And so that’s why this is a really hard thing to do today. But I really step back and think, ‘What is the best thing for us, and not just me, but our whole team?’ And I keep trying to think of what is best for our country right now. So I decided that I’m going to be endorsing Vice President Biden today.”

Klobuchar, despite a strong third-place finish in New Hampshire, lagged her moderate rivals in every other state and was often seen as a candidate siphoning support. Though she had varying levels of support across the Super Tuesday map, polling within reach of leading candidates in some predominantly Republican states with open primaries, it is unclear how much of a boost any of her rivals will see in the wake of Klobuchar’s exit or where she may direct her seven delegates.

The senator from Minnesota shocked her rivals with her performance in New Hampshire, finishing ahead of better-known candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Biden.

But aside from New Hampshire, Klobuchar struggled deeply, lagging all of her competitors in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina. Though her campaign received a much-needed influx of cash after New Hampshire — $12 million in just over a week — it proved too little, too late for the campaign to rapidly scale up and compete with her better funded and better organized rivals.

The Klobuchar campaign was constantly rescheduling events, often releasing public advisories for an event with less than 24 hours advance notice. One “get out the caucus” rally in Nevada at Rancho High School attracted less than 100 people. Days before, Buttigieg brought more than 1,200 to the same school.

Klobuchar was forced to cancel a rally in her own backyard Sunday night, after protesters from Black Lives Matter and local civil rights groups took over the stage in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. They were calling attention to the case of Myon Burrell, a black man convicted of murder as a teenager while Klobuchar was county attorney.

Recent news reports have raised questions about the case, including numerous reported flaws with the prosecution. Klobuchar, while stopping short of apologizing, has called for the case to be reviewed.

The frantic scramble to build out a national campaign followed a diligent and relentless focus on Iowa. Klobuchar was the first 2020 candidate to visit all 99 counties and spent most of her time, money and field staff deployed to the state. Her self-described “gritty” effort in Iowa kept her on the debate stage, meeting polling thresholds in early states rather than in national polls.

With a calm but prosecutorial demeanor mixed with a dry sense of humor, Klobuchar slowly built momentum through consecutive debate performances, seeing immediate spikes in cash and volunteers. But she never experienced a true “viral moment” — something she lamented in the closing days of her campaign while speaking in Nashville, Tennessee — forcing her to run a threadbare operation in every state outside of Iowa.

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Klobuchar famously kicked off her campaign in the middle of a blizzard a year ago, her nearly hourlong presidential announcement marked by the piles of snow that accumulated on her hatless head as she debuted her centrist message.

On the campaign trail, she would refer frequently to her snowy beginnings as she continually pitched her Midwestern roots as a presidential credential, arguing that her “I live here” heartland appeal could win back states like Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, which President Donald Trump carried in 2016.

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As a perpetual and direct contrast to the vocal liberal base of the Democratic Party, Klobuchar stubbornly stuck to a moderate message, one she hoped would appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. She vocally opposed “Medicare for All” and built one of her most popular stump speech lines around defending the Affordable Care Act, claiming that it was “10 points more popular than the guy in the White House right now.”

Her campaign also amounted to a bet that in a deeply polarized electorate, a bipartisan voting record could still be viewed as an asset in the Democratic electorate. She regularly highlighted the more than 100 bills that she had passed during her 14-year Senate career and name-checked Republican senators whom she frequently worked with in her stump speech.

But her bipartisan record also carried some risk; she was among the most likely Democratic senators to vote for a Trump judicial nominee, a point seized on by rivals like Buttigieg in debates.

She struggled more than any other candidate to attract support in minority communities, particularly among black voters. And she faced calls from local civil rights organizations in Minneapolis, including the NAACP chapter, to suspend her campaign over the Burrell case.

As she made her final run, Klobuchar abandoned South Carolina, the first state to vote with a meaningful black population, four days early. And her Super Tuesday campaign swing through 11 different states avoided the two biggest and most diverse: Texas and California.

But the senator kept her message upbeat throughout the campaign, and she always had her New Hampshire finish to point to, as she did in Nashville a few days before Super Tuesday.

“We have been really, really beating the odds,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .