Cory Booker Blames Impeachment for Early Withdrawal from 2020 Race

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said Monday that the impeachment of President Donald Trump was partly to blame for his decision to drop out of the 2020 presidential race.

In an email to supporters, Booker cited several reasons for leaving the race, including the fact that the president’s impending Senate trial would require him to be in Washington, DC, taking energy away from fundraising efforts, and keeping him away from the campaign trail in early primary states.

Booker said (emphasis added):

It was a difficult decision to make, but I got in this race to win, and I’ve always said I wouldn’t continue if there was no longer a path to victory.

Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win — money we don’t have, and money that is harder to raise because I won’t be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington.

So I’ve chosen to suspend my campaign now, take care of my wonderful staff, and give you time to consider the other strong choices in the field.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is expected to transmit the articles of impeachment passed by the House on Dec. 18 to the Senate this week, after a long delay and despite claiming for weeks that the matter was urgent.

Booker failed to qualify for the upcoming Democrat debate in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday evening. He also failed to qualify for the most recent debate in Los Angeles in December, protesting at that time that the Democratic presidential field had more “billionaires than black people.” He also recently criticized the Iowa debate for its “lack of diversity.”

The Democrat debate stage will feature six candidates who managed to meet the polling and fundraising criteria. All six are white.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.