Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said she changed her views on gun rights when she became a senator and met with the Brooklyn family of a slain teenager. | Juana Summers/AP Photo 2020 Elections The 'I'm sorry' 2020 Democratic primary Expressions of regret for past positions out of step with today's Democratic Party have become an early staple of the presidential race.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand regrets that, as a conservative-leaning Democratic congresswoman, she backed gun rights and held “callous” views on immigration.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is sorry for past “offensive and hurtful statements” about the LGBTQ community.


Bernie Sanders is sorry, too — he's repeatedly apologized the women who were revealed to be sexually mistreated while working on his last campaign for president, before the #MeToo movement.

Even before the 2020 Democratic presidential primary kicks into gear — and ahead of Sanders’ own decision about whether he’ll run again — the contours of the race are being shaped by an apology tour of sorts.

While White House aspirants have long sought to dispense with unflattering elements of their records, the velocity of the party’s leftward shift has Democratic hopefuls scrambling to catch up — making remorse an early staple of the campaign. The grueling, eight-minute segment Gillibrand endured on Rachel Maddow's show Wednesday night on her ideological transformation was probably only a taste of what's in store.

“People want answers to the questions [about candidates' records] right now,” said Jerry Skurnik, a Democratic consultant in New York. “But there’s also no question that a large proportion of the Democratic Party’s likely voters has moved further to the left.”

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The number of candidates seeking repentance is expected to grow. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served for decades in the Senate, will be forced to relive his push for the crime bill of 1994, which paid for more police patrols, prisons and border security, and his earlier efforts to establish mandatory minimums for drug crimes. Biden, former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has yet to apologize to Anita Hill for his handling of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas.

“The longer you have been in public life, and the longer voting record you have, the more you’ll have to answer to things you did,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns. “The quality of your candidacy will be your ability to answer to it.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, who may enter the presidential race in the coming days, is already seeing her record dissected as a career line prosecutor, district attorney and then state attorney general. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, now exploring a run of her own, has faced questions about being a member of the Republican Party until her switch in 1996.

Gabbard issued her apology this week in a video after the past remarks resurfaced with her presidential ambitions. CNN published statements and reports from earlier in her career, including a 2002 quote in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin where she spoke about working against same-sex marriage with her father’s anti-LGBT organization. Also included was a Gabbard quote from her time as a state legislator, when she advocated that “as Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”

“In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were very hurtful to the people in the LGBTQ community and to their loved ones,” Gabbard said in the apology video.

Sanders’ apologies — first on cable TV, and later at the Capitol — came after POLITICO and others reported on allegations of sexual harassment and violence during his 2016 campaign. On Wednesday, the Vermont senator met with a group of staffers who aired their concerns, ahead of his trip to South Carolina to mark Martin Luther King Day.

Carol Fowler, a longtime party activist in South Carolina, said the revised positions and walk-backs have not dampened her enthusiasm about meeting the Democrats and hearing more about them.

“Most of these candidates are unknown to many of us and we would like to get to know them better before we say, ‘Oh, that’s not a real Democrat,’” Fowler told POLITICO. “Whatever a candidate did years ago, Democrats will look at their work since then. We would like to see if they actually have a record since that time which is more in line with Democratic thinking.”

For Gillibrand, who announced her plans to seek the White House Tuesday on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the questions she now faces trace back to her political rise in 2006. That year, she won an underdog challenge to Republican then-Rep. John Sweeney in a GOP-heavy, overwhelmingly white New York district.

In the House, Gillibrand earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association; opposed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; and, according to a CNN report, opposed “amnesty for illegal immigrants” and voted to increase funding for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to work with local law enforcement on deportations. Those and other past Gillibrand positions, including wanting to make English the official language of the U.S., were recounted in painstaking detail by Maddow.

The liberal host didn’t hold back in her introduction, referring to Gillibrand’s political “transformation.”

“She has been on her own party’s right,” the popular MSNBC host said. “She has been on her own party’s left.”

Gillibrand, for her part, said she came to realize the errors of her ways when she became a senator and met with the Brooklyn family of a slain teenager — a story she often cites to explain her shift on gun control. “And now, I’ve been a leader on these issues,” the senator added, noting her support for universal background checks and bans on assault rifles and large magazines.

Later, Maddow said she was struck to hear Gillibrand tell CBS’ “60 Minutes” that she was essentially embarrassed by her previous positions on immigrants.

“Well, I don't think it was driven from my heart. I was callous to the suffering of families who want to be with their loved ones, people who want to be reunited with their families,” Gillibrand said.

Looking back, she added, “I really regretted that I didn’t look beyond my district and talk about why this is an important part of the United States story, and why it’s an important part of our strength.”

