Sen. Amy Klobuchar will end her presidential bid on Monday and endorse Joe Biden, a campaign aide tells CNN.
The Klobuchar campaign confirmed that the senator is flying to Dallas to join the former vice president at his rally, where she will suspend her campaign and give her endorsement on the eve of Super Tuesday. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg also will endorse Biden at the rally, a source familiar told CNN.
Klobuchar’s path to the nomination all but closed after she posted sixth-place finishes in Nevada and South Carolina, a sign that the Minnesota senator’s surprising showing in New Hampshire would not be nearly enough to propel her toward the nomination, CNN reports.
A Democratic official told CNN that the Klobuchar campaign was worried that the senator would lose her home state of Minnesota on Tuesday. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the race’s front-runner, is holding a rally in the state on Monday night.
The high point of Klobuchar’s campaign came in mid-February, when a strong debate days before the New Hampshire primary led to a third-place finish in the state. But the showing even caught Klobuchar’s campaign off guard, and a lack of organization on the ground in Nevada and South Carolina, along with the senator’s inability to win over Latino and black voters, ultimately stalled her candidacy.
Klobuchar launched her campaign pledging to focus on the “nation’s heartland,” hoping to use her status as a Midwesterner to convince Democrats that the best way to defeat President Donald Trump is to nominate someone who could bring back disaffected voters in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. On the campaign trail, she frequently joked about building a “Blue Wall” around the Midwest and making “Donald Trump pay for it.” Those two states, which backed BarackObama and then flipped to Trump, will be critical in the general election.
“I have the receipts,” Klobuchar repeatedly said in the close of her campaign, pointing to the fact that she won some of Minnesota’s more rural, conservative counties.
That strategy led Klobuchar to devote much of her campaign to Iowa, staking any future success on her ability to win over voters there who, in many ways, share cultural similarities with voters in Minnesota.
The senator, though, turned in a fifth-place finish in Iowa.
That left Klobuchar weakened in New Hampshire until, days before voters went to the polls there, the senator delivered an electric debate performance that raised her campaign millions, filled her following campaign events with people and gave her enocugh momentum to notch a third-place finish in the state.
“We are taking this campaign to Nevada. We are going to South Carolina. And we are taking this message of unity to the country,” she said on the night of that primary, the apex of her campaign.
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