Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) just won reelection to the Senate in 2018, and she finished that campaign with $10.5 million in her federal campaign account. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images 2020 Elections Kirsten Gillibrand launches presidential exploratory committee The New York senator will visit Iowa this weekend as she joins the crowded Democratic 2020 field.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand launched a presidential exploratory committee Tuesday night, joining the crowded Democratic hunt to win the White House in 2020.

The New York Democrat, a longtime advocate for women in politics and a leader in the #MeToo movement supporting survivors of sexual assault, announced her decision to run for president on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” saying she will “fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own.”


Gillibrand’s first week in the campaign will include a debut visit to Iowa, the first caucus state. On Friday, Gillibrand will hold an event in Sioux City, followed by stops in Ames, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids throughout the weekend.

Gillibrand, 52, has joined an expansive field that could see dozens of Democratic presidential hopefuls — including several other high-profile women — aiming to defeat President Donald Trump. Elizabeth Warren, Gillibrand’s Senate colleague, launched an exploratory committee at the end of 2018, while former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro became the latest Democrat to join the fray on Saturday, when he announced his campaign in San Antonio.

Last week, Gillibrand’s tight-knit political operation expanded to include new senior staff hires and designated her campaign manager, Jess Fassler, the senator’s longtime chief of staff. The campaign also signed a lease for a campaign headquarters in Troy, N.Y., a suburb of Albany where Gillibrand’s family lives. The exploratory committee launch gives Gillibrand the opportunity to hire more staff and begin fundraising expressly for a 2020 run.

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Gillibrand just won reelection to the Senate in 2018, and she finished that campaign with $10.5 million in her federal campaign account — a hefty nest egg to kick-start a presidential run, trailing only Warren among the half-dozen senators in who could seek Democratic nomination. Gillibrand’s campaign spent the last two years building an online army capable of financing a presidential run , spending heavily with a digital fundraising firm in 2017 and 2018 and gathering donations from hundreds of thousands of donors nationwide as her profile rose in opposition to Trump.

No senator voted against as many Cabinet nominees as Gillibrand in the early months of the Trump administration, winning her praise from the rising “resistance” movement opposing the president. After she called for Trump’s resignation in December 2017, Trump targeted her with a sexually suggestive tweet, saying that Gillibrand “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them).”

Trump’s post drew swift backlash. Gillibrand tweeted back: “You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office.”

On Colbert's show, Gillibrand said she would restore "the integrity and the compassion of this country" in office and called for health care to be treated as “a right, and not a privilege.” She said better public schools and job training is essential for anyone to “earn their way into the middle class.”

“But you are never going to accomplish any of these things if you are not going to take on the systems of power that make all of that impossible,” Gillibrand said. “It’s taking on institutional racism, it’s taking on the corruption and greed in Washington, [it’s] taking on the special interests that write legislation in the dead of night.”

Gillibrand, who was appointed to the Senate in 2009 to replace former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and has since won two full terms, has also been the face of the #MeToo movement in Congress. One of her signature legislative efforts sought to reform how the military handles cases of sexual harassment and assault, though it fell short after failing to break a Senate filibuster in March 2014. Gillibrand has also shared stories of her own experiences with harassment — recounting in her memoir that a fellow senator once squeezed her waist and told her, “I like my girls chubby.”

Significantly, Gillibrand also stepped forward to call out bad behavior among prominent members of her own party.

In 2017, Gillibrand was the first Democratic senator to call for the resignation of her former colleague Al Franken (D-Minn.), after multiple women accused him of harassment and misconduct. Gillibrand also told The New York Times it would have been “appropriate” for former President Bill Clinton to resign following revelations of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Gillibrand’s comments won her favor from some, but also drew criticism from high-profile Democrats who said they would no longer financially support the New York Democrat.

Gillibrand pushed back, writing on Twitter that “silencing women for the powerful, or for your friends, or for convenience, is neither acceptable nor just.” She told MSNBC that the “tolerance that we had 25 years ago, what was allowed 25 years ago, will not be tolerated today, is not allowed today.”

“She had the guts to take on the military. She had the guts to take on her own party,” said John Zogby, a New York-based pollster who worked for one of Gillibrand’s primary opponents in 2006. “She’s in some hot water with the establishment over it, but I can’t think of a better time in history to be at odds with the establishment. I think it helps her.”

Gillibrand’s commitment to the feminist cause — which included founding a leadership PAC called “Off The Sidelines” to support other women running for office — may be a boon for her in a crowded primary with few breakaway issues.

“It’s a natural strategy for Gillibrand to build off of the momentum of 2018, and she has a long history of advocating for women that she can authentically point to,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “But a lot of candidates will try to do this.”

But as Gillibrand competes with other candidates to appeal to female voters, she’ll also have to defend her own political transformation — from a conservative Blue Dog Democrat in the House to the Senate’s most-vocal anti-Trump member.

In 2006, Gillibrand, then a corporate attorney and first-time political candidate, defeated GOP Rep. John Sweeney in a Democratic wave to represent a predominantly white, working-class district that stretched from Albany to the Adirondacks in upstate New York. At the time, Gillibrand touted an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association and opposed amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

But after her appointment to the Senate in 2009, she drifted leftward on gun control and immigration. Gillibrand has since said she was “embarrassed” by her former positions on gun control. By 2018, she called for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a proposal popular with progressive activists.

“I came from a district that was 98 percent white,” Gillibrand told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview last year. “I just didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn’t right in front of me, and that was my fault.”