2020 Democratic primaries race opens with first round of presidential bids

From left to right: Democratic 2020 candidates Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro.

Wikimedia Commons

From left to right: Democratic 2020 candidates Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro.

by Kathy Fang, Managing Editor

Three prominent Democrats—Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—have announced their candidacy for the 2020 presidential election, setting the Democratic primaries race in motion.

Warren, a socialist-leaning Democrat who has represented Massachusetts in the Senate since 2013, first declared her decision to form an exploratory committee for the 2020 presidential race on New Year’s Eve via Twitter. She has since travelled to Iowa, whose caucuses are the first in the 2020 presidential election cycle, for a preliminary visit during the weekend of Jan. 4.

Castro announced his bid for the presidency at a rally in San Antonio on Jan. 12. In his speech, he called for immigration reform as well as solutions to climate change, voicing his support for the Green New Deal, an environmental reform bill proposed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., earlier this year.

As mayor of San Antonio, Castro implemented a funding program to provide pre-kindergarten education to all children, an plan that he intends to administer across the entire nation if he is elected president.

His bid comes a day after Gabbard announced her preliminary presidential bid on Friday in an interview with CNN’s Van Jones.