Why Is Gillibrand Such A Colossal Flop?

Kirsten Gillibrand already re-started her campaign launch-- twice. It didn't do a bit of good either time. No does the whining about how everyone is ignoring her because she's a woman... as Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and even Amy Klobuchar leave her in the dust. Her polling averages are putrid and it's a joke she's even being allowed into the first debate. The latest RealClearPolitics national average of polls shows her at 0.8%, trying to catch up to Andrew Yang. Her average in Iowa is worse-- 0.6%-- and it's really awful in New Hampshire... just 0.3%, even worse than Frackenlooper! And she's not even doing as well as that in Massachusetts, a super Tuesday state where she's unlikely to pick up a single delegate. And in her own state, New York... oy. Bad polling, few small donors and almost no endorsements from her colleagues.

Cory Booker won the endorsement of all 11 New Jersey members of Congress and the other U.S. Senator + the governor, lieutenant governor, Senate president and General Assembly speaker. Contrast that with Gillibrand, who managed to wrangle an endorsement from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who has her own primary troubles because of her coziness with Wall Street banksters. Although she hasn't made a formal endorsement, the furthest right on any statewide official in New York, the state's putrid lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, gave Gillibrand a maxed out donation.

Her campaign's latest incredibly lame excuse for its failure to win any endorsements: "the campaign does not expect Gillibrand to be an establishment candidate and its strategy reflects that." Newsday reported that a national party official from New York speaking on the condition of anonymity said Gillibrand hasn't generated much good will among fellow politicos in the state. Another official, also speaking anonymously, noted that Gillibrand rose to her post more as an individual than as a team player. Small donors have stayed away and she stopped taking money from Wall Street and corporate PACs when she was severely criticized for doing so but... she transferred $10 million in that kind of sewer money from her Senate account to her current presidential campaign.

And that brings us to Edward-Isaac Dovere's weekend piece in The Atlantic, This Isn’t Going According to Plan for Kirsten Gillibrand. He finally said aloud what no journalists allow themselves to write: everyone hates her. "This isn’t going well for Gillibrand," he wrote. "She has failed at some basics. For someone who’s always been a voracious fundraiser, she raised just $3 million in the first quarter of the year, less than half of what South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg raised. And she was weeks behind the self-help author Marianne Williamson and the automation alarmist Andrew Yang in getting the 65,000 donors needed to guarantee her a spot on the Democratic debate stage later this month. (Her campaign announced she finally passed that mark last weekend.) Gillibrand is a United States senator from New York, and this is the best she can do. A mess, maybe. But it’s no more of a mess than at least a dozen other candidates who are underperforming just as much, or worse. If all the candidates who, like Gillibrand, haven’t broken 2 percent in the polls were subject to as much coverage about how terribly they were doing, there wouldn’t be room for coverage of anything else."

This is the story Gillibrand tells about herself, and she tells it consistently: “I have always been underestimated-- not only by potential opponents, but by the media,” she said in a 2010 interview, right after she’d dispatched what seemed likely to be a serious primary challenge from a former representative. “It will be the tale of the tortoise versus the hare, and I am the tortoise. Every campaign I’ve ever had, it’s always been part of my story, and I was not helped by many people who should have helped me,” she told me when we sat down briefly in April at a Friendly’s outside Concord, New Hampshire. “I am an underdog, and I’ve always been in every race I’ve ever had, and I win people over based on the merits,” she told me last week in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The potential reasons for why her campaign hasn’t caught on are seemingly endless. People working with her campaign acknowledge that she clearly underestimated how much her being out front in calling for Al Franken to resign from the Senate was going to haunt her-- even though that was a year and a half ago, and despite the fact that all the other senators in the race called for him to go too. Among primary voters and partisan media outlets that put a premium on purity, no one is letting go of her past pro-gun or anti-immigrant positions. The media spotlight she gets in New York and Washington only makes it more shocking when insiders in those cities realize she’s largely unknown to almost everyone else.

Gillibrand claims to be not surprised that big donors haven’t been as supportive as she would have wanted. She claims to be not surprised that she’s been slow to gain a following. She claims to be not surprised that she seems stuck in a time loop, with almost every event and interview including questions about Franken and how she’s changed her position on gun control since running in her first House race. “They don’t know me,” she reasons, so they’re going for the easy attacks on her, but “once I get the chance to speak about who I am, what I’ve done, and what I intend to do, I believe the questions will change, and what people know about me will change.”

...What many had expected was for Gillibrand to blast into the race as the candidate of women’s empowerment, seizing on the #MeToo movement and the greater moment of female activism that has been driving Democratic victories. That’s tough in a race with six female candidates, including three other prominent female senators, but it’s also a theme that Gillibrand has largely left alone until now, deciding that because people are so concerned with electability, she’d focus instead on how she’s been able to win in tough districts and get bills passed.

...I’d asked people who have worked for and around Gillibrand what it is that makes people not like her. The answers all included some mention of how much of a striver she is and how clear her ambition is—a complaint laced with notes of sexism that critics have had about her for years, though particularly weird in a presidential race, in which over-the-top ambition and ego are prerequisites.

She's still being called to answer for her Franken crap and still immediately gets out the shovel and starts digging herself in deeper. Watch her on Fox, where she came across angry and mean. She didn't win any converts, even if some people applauded a bit.