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Cracks are forming in the dam that Hawaii’s U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard built to keep out the reality of her 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.
Real-world politics is breaking through and the Gabbard campaign is floundering.
Taken by herself, Gabbard is an interesting political entity. She is smart with an active political mind. Articulate without appearing glib, Gabbard is a hard-working, former member of the state House of Representatives and the Honolulu City Council. She has been deployed on two Hawaii National Guard tours of duty in the Middle East.
Her jump from a pedestrian City Council career to national politics, first as a dark-horse victor in a U.S. House race and then as the surrogate for presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, solidified her belief that she was destined for more, while observers felt she was ambitious to a fault.
Gabbard announced that she was running for president of the United States in January. As is expected for a politician from the nation’s only state in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Gabbard is a little-known factor with few resources, contacts or supporters to make her campaign viable.
Now there are new threats, roiling both her presidential campaign and her own political future.
The first challenge is a new hurdle by her own Democratic Party. Concerned that there are just too many Democratic candidates for president, Tom Perez, Democratic National Committee chairman, last week announced that after the summer national debates, the qualifications needed to appear in future debates have been tightened.
Instead of needing to register 1 percent in a national poll, candidates will need to register 2% in several polls. Candidates who needed to show 65,000 unique donors for the first rounds of debates, will need 130,000 individual donors to show grassroots support in order to proceed. Gabbard was just barely able to meet the threshold the first time around; the second may be a barrier too high.
The Gabbard campaign did not respond to requests to comment, but the second round of debates starting in September might be the end date for Gabbard’s presidential campaign.
The second question, however, still looms: What is to become of Tulsi Gabbard, the political leader?
Gabbard’s congressional career started in 2013 and she has, so far, not said if she would run for reelection.
For many, a failed presidential campaign can still be a resume-builder, but if your campaign echoed with “Who is that?” the resume is fairly shaky.
As for running for reelection, Gabbard is not finding quick assurances.
The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, in a weekly political analysis, noted that Gabbard could be in trouble.
“A couple of long-shot presidential candidates who have been a thorn in the side of House leadership, Reps. Seth Moulton (D, MA-6) and Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI-2), may need to tend to the home fires before too long lest they find themselves in primary trouble.”
Gabbard has neither been home campaigning, nor in Washington; she has been running for president and her local political brand and legislative duties have suffered.
According to the D.C.-based web page Gov Track, from “Jan 2013 to May 2019, Gabbard missed 166 of 3,970 roll call votes, which is 4.2%. This is worse than the median of 2.1% among the lifetime records of representa-
tives currently serving. During April-May of 2019, Gabbard missed 26.3% of the votes.”
Already, state Sen. Kai Kahele has announced a run for her seat and former Govs. John Waihee, Ben Cayetano and Neil Abercrombie have endorsed him.
Gabbard, the shooting star of Hawaii politics, may be on the verge of flaming out.
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