Several Democratic presidential candidates are spending the long holiday weekend on the campaign trail, while a Republican has announced he’s creating an exploratory committee for a possible 2020 run.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California are visiting early voting states on Friday that will be critical to securing the Democratic nomination next year.
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2016, said Friday that he was considering challenging President Donald Trump in a 2020 Republican primary.
Kirsten Gillibrand
Gillibrand, in New Hampshire, participated in a walking tour of downtown Concord before visiting businesses in Dover and meeting members of the LGBT community in Somersworth.
On Friday, she called Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border “inappropriate” and said Trump manufactured a crisis to justify the move.
The only national emergency, she said, “is the humanitarian crisis that President Trump has created at our border from separating family from children and treating people who need our help inhumanely.”
Kamala Harris
Harris, who is campaigning in South Carolina, visited Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of the 2015 shooting that killed nine African-American churchgoers.
Speaking to reporters after a lunchtime stop, Harris said she’d visited the church, known as Mother Emanuel, earlier Friday and called it a “very tragic symbol of failure of people, in particular in the United States Congress, to pass smart gun safety laws.”
At a town hall in North Charleston later Friday, the scoreboard overhead in the gymnasium was changed to reflect the date of South Carolina’s Democratic primary: Feb. 29, 2020. Harris talked about the bill that the Senate passed this week that would explicitly make lynching a federal crime. .
William Weld
Weld, who is little-known on the national stage but well-respected among veterans in the GOP, announced the creation of an exploratory committee for president on Friday.
The move makes Trump the first incumbent president since Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992 to face a notable primary challenge.
Weld served as Massachusetts governor from 1991 to 1997 and was popular despite being a Republican in a heavily Democratic state.
