Presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has focused on making stops in areas with large South Asian communities in states with less 2020 influence. | Steven Senne/AP Photo 2020 Elections Where in the world is Tulsi Gabbard? The Hawaii congresswoman's 2020 presidential campaign has not hewed to a traditional travel schedule.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s quixotic run for the White House isn’t sticking to a normal presidential campaign travel schedule.

Gabbard, a four-term House Democrat from Hawaii, traveled to Chicagoland soon after entering the 2020 race to visit the Chicago Kali Bari House of Spirituality and Worship before proceeding to Iowa. In early March, she scheduled a foreign policy speech at Brown University in Rhode Island and visited Love City Brewing Company in Philadelphia.


And as Gabbard jumped into the presidential campaign this winter, she was listed as a headliner for a summit of environmental activists on an island owned by Sir Richard Branson. (Gabbard’s campaign later said she planned on Skyping the conference instead.)

The underdog Democratic candidate has dropped into early caucus and primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and on Friday, Gabbard’s campaign announced a pair of town halls in Nevada. But Gabbard, who is Hindu, has focused more on stopping in communities with large South Asian communities in states with less 2020 influence — a scattershot approach that calls into question whether Gabbard and her noninterventionist foreign policy can make a mark on the 2020 race.

“She does not seem to be following the lockstep early-state cadence,” said veteran Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth.

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The schedule has baffled Democratic operatives. Former Gabbard staffers, who declined to go on the record for this story, were equally confused, saying they would not have advised the approach she’s taken.

“It does appear to me that her candidacy is really not one that’s trying to win, it’s one that’s trying to bring a foreign policy perspective to the race in terms of nontraditional alliances and nonaggression and form a peace plank,” said a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, when Gabbard served as one of the few congressional surrogates for the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign. “So she doesn’t care about going to South Carolina because she’s not legitimately trying to seize the nomination.”

Gabbard’s campaign declined to comment.

Over the weekend, she held a pair of town halls in California’s Bay Area — the heart of Sen. Kamala Harris’ territory. One event was in Fremont, an area with a large Hindu population, at the Royal Palace Banquet Hall, while the other was at the University of San Francisco.

In California, Gabbard sounded off on her favorite policy points, explaining her support for “Medicare for All” and criticizing the United States’ military interventionism across the world. Gabbard warned that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost the country “trillions of dollars out of our pockets for health care, infrastructure, education, for clean energy,” she said in Fremont, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Gabbard added: “We cannot address these challenges, we cannot make these bold investments unless we end these wasteful regime-change wars.”

Gabbard is perhaps best known as the candidate who has most measured her criticism of Syrian President Bashar Assad, at times refraining from critiques of him. She said that she was “skeptical” that Assad’s government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in April 2017, though she has since said there was "no disputing" that Assad has used chemical weapons. At a recent town hall hosted by CNN, she avoided answering whether Assad is a war criminal.

“I think that the evidence needs to be gathered, and as I have said before, if there is evidence that he has committed war crimes, he should be prosecuted as such,” Gabbard said.

There has been little traditional about Gabbard’s presidential campaign from the start, when she went on CNN in mid-January to say she was running — and then waited two weeks to put out a launch video and another week-plus after that to hold an official kickoff event. During that time, Gabbard’s campaign manager and her digital consulting firm split from the campaign.

“There’s no real political leadership team there,” said the former Sanders adviser.

Meanwhile, while others running for president jumped into the 2020 field with backing from home-state congressional colleagues, Gabbard was embroiled in a bitter public feud with Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono, and she had to backtrack and apologize for past comments about same-sex marriage and her work for an anti-gay group.

A recent Des Moines Register survey in Iowa found Gabbard polling near the bottom of the Democratic primary field.

Her campaign has recovered from its initial launch fumbles and added a few staffers, including Noland Chambliss, a veteran Democratic activist and field operative. But still the campaign is largely operating outside typical Democratic and progressive circles.

“I have no contact with her or her campaign. I don’t even know anyone that’s working with her or her campaign,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, who along with Gabbard supported Sanders in the 2016 presidential race.

Former Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who is backing Beto O’Rourke in the Democratic presidential contest, said Gabbard so far has just been trying to establish herself and her views on the national stage.

“I think she’s establishing, at this stage, a track record that people are going to pay attention to,” Abercromie said.

But while Gabbard tries to take her message national, she’s facing trouble at home. A trio of former Hawaii governors, including Abercrombie, are supporting state Sen. Kai Kahele in a run for Gabbard’s congressional seat. Two of those governors were listed as headliners for a Kahele fundraiser on Thursday, according to a copy of the fundraising invitation obtained by POLITICO.

The primary challenge, should Gabbard decide to run for reelection in 2020 if her presidential ambitions falter, could mean a swift end to the political career of a former rising star in the Democratic Party.

“I think for a while she was a darling of the progressive movement,” Kleeb said. “And then anybody I know, any leader I know, just thinks she’s weird.”

CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this article stated that Tulsi Gabbard has refrained from criticizing Syrian President Bashar Assad. Gabbard has also spoken out about Assad's use of chemical weapons and his treatment of the Syrian people.