Matt Stevens

On Veterans Day, former Vice President Joe Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont released extensive plans outlining how they would help them. They follow a similarly detailed proposal unveiled last week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and they join a lengthy list of policy plans released by candidates throughout the summer and fall.

Here’s a closer look at the measures Democrats are calling for, and how their proposals contrast with what President Donald Trump has already done.

Improve and update the VA

Almost every candidate agrees that the VA needs to be able to function better than it currently does and has pledged to give the agency the resources it needs to work efficiently. Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren are among those who have called for the agency to fill its more than 49,000 staffing vacancies. Biden and Sanders, among others, have said they would invest in modernizing VA hospitals, clinics and other infrastructure. And in a commonly heard refrain, several Democrats have promised to eliminate the perennial “benefits backlog” that forces tens of thousands of veterans to wait for a determination on the benefits they can receive.

Buttigieg, a former Navy intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan, proposes making the VA apolitical “by appointing leaders with relevant expertise and ensuring continuity in leadership across administrations.” And in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday, he said he’d seek to name a woman to head the agency for the first time. “I think leadership plays a huge role, so, absolutely I’d seek to name a woman to lead VA,” he said.

Provide veterans with better care

Several candidates have promised that under their administrations, veterans would get access to affordable and comprehensive health care. Under that umbrella, candidates like Sanders have specifically promised to guarantee dental care, expand the VA’s comprehensive caregiver program and other measures.

Multiple candidates also have called attention to veteran suicide and pledged to invest in research, mental health services and housing to help address the issue. Warren has said she would aim to reduce the number of veteran suicides by 50% within her first term. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey suggested appointing a White House official solely focused on working across agencies to cut the suicide rate.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, meanwhile, is among those who have called for expanding access to health care and housing assistance for veterans with “other-than-honorable” discharges, which they may have received because they experienced trauma or other reasons beyond their control.

Improve access to education, training and jobs

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and other candidates have also outlined ways to support veterans once they re-enter civilian life. For instance, Klobuchar has proposed extending GI Bill education benefits to members of the National Guard and Reserve and implementing a grant program that would invest in veteran education centers.

Several candidates have also said they would expand and improve incentives for companies to hire veterans, and that they would direct government agencies to invest in more veteran-owned businesses and entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang has argued for what he calls a “reverse boot camp” which would seek to help veterans adjust to life after the military by training them in skills like cooking, financial literacy and how to interview for a job.

Ensuring equal treatment

Candidates also promised to rescind Trump’s ban on transgender service members, stand up for victims of sexual assault in the military and protect veterans and family members of service members from deportation.

Warren has called the ban on transgender service members “shameful.” And Buttigieg said his administration would reach out to people who were discharged because of their gender identity and give them a chance to re-enlist.

Klobuchar said in her proposal that more than 20,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2018. She and other Democrats have proposed various ways to strengthen the prosecution of perpetrators and expand access to counseling for victims.

In her plan, Warren noted that protections from deportation for veterans have been eroding under the Trump administration, and pledged to restart a program that makes it easier for noncitizens who serve to become naturalized.

What Trump has already done

Trump, who kicked off the 100th annual New York City Veterans Day Parade in Manhattan on Monday, has also sought to court veterans, a group he views as a key piece of his political base.

Public polls have found that Trump’s support among veterans outpaces his support from the public at large. He has garnered praise from some veterans for railing against “endless wars,” much like 2020 Democratic candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard who served two combat tours in the Middle East.

Trump campaigned in 2016 on wanting to put more veterans in private health care. To help accomplish that goal, Congress passed health care legislation known as the Mission Act in 2018 and the VA rolled out new rules this year that allowed a broad group of enrollees to seek care outside the agency. Although Trump has heralded the program as great success, it has struggled to grow its network of doctors to meet coverage demands.

For all his talk of supporting veterans, Trump has also sometimes snubbed them. He admitted in court documents that he gave his campaign control over how to spend $2.8 million that his charity raised through what was ostensibly a fundraiser for veterans.

Last year, he chose to forgo a traditional visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day, a decision that led him to issue a rare apology. He drew wide condemnation during the 2016 campaign when he criticized the parents of a slain soldier who had denounced him, and he frequently attacked Sen. John McCain, saying the former Navy pilot and prisoner of war was “not a war hero.”

This article originally appeared in

How the 2020 Democrats Plan to Help Veterans

The large field of Democrats running for president may have differing views on the best way to provide health care to the masses or exactly how to reform the immigration system. But when it comes to helping America’s veterans they largely agree: The Department of Veterans Affairs needs some serious help, and those who have served need much better access to benefits, health care, housing, education and jobs.

Warren rolled out a proposal to break up Facebook, Amazon and other tech giants in March. To ensure that tech workers got her message, her campaign paid for a billboard near a major transit station in San Francisco. In all capital letters, the billboard read: “Break Up Big Tech.”

On Tuesday, nearly seven months after Warren first unveiled her plan, The Verge offered a window into what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, thinks about it. In leaked audio recordings of open meetings with employees this summer, Zuckerberg can be heard speculating about how the company would respond to Warren if she were to enact the plan as president.

“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” he said.

“Does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. That’s not like the position you want to be in. We care about our country and want to work with our government to do good things,” he added. “But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

Shortly after The Verge published Zuckerberg’s remarks, Warren responded by renewing her criticism of Facebook.

“What would really ‘suck,’” she said, mimicking Zuckerberg’s language, “is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”

The public surfacing of grievances between Warren and Zuckerberg has the effect of publicly pitting one of the leading Democratic candidates for president against the head of the world’s largest social network, at a time when Silicon Valley in general and Facebook in particular continue to be scrutinized for its efforts to combat disinformation and prevent election interference in 2020 and beyond.

In the audio recording clipped and published by The Verge, Zuckerberg ties his criticism of Warren’s plan to concerns about election interference.

“It’s just that breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues,” he said. “And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.”

After the leaked audio was published and Warren responded, Zuckerberg commented on the episode in a Facebook post.

“Every week I do a Q&amp;A; at Facebook where employees get to ask me anything and I share openly what I’m thinking on all kinds of projects and issues,” he said. “The transcript from one of my Q&amp;As; a few months ago just got published online — and even though it was meant to be internal rather than public, now that it’s out there, you can check it out if you’re interested in seeing an unfiltered version of what I’m thinking and telling employees on a bunch of topics.”

Warren, meanwhile, used the renewed focus on the issue as an opportunity to reiterate that she is “not afraid to hold Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon accountable.”

In her proposal, Warren argues that the tech giants have essentially developed monopolies — they have “bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.”

Her plan calls for legislation that would prohibit platforms like Amazon from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace; appointing regulators to undo some tech mergers; and rolling back some acquisitions by tech giants, such as Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram.

By offering a steady diet of detailed policy proposals, Warren has grown her following significantly and risen to the top of the polls. Her plans to reshape the government extend to areas like the economy and education, where she has called for a wealth tax and canceling student loan debt.

“We have these giant corporations — do I have to tell that to people in Long Island City? — that think they can roll over everyone,” Warren told a crowd there earlier this year, after Amazon pulled out of plans to build a new campus in the neighborhood. “I’m sick of freeloading billionaires.”

Zuckerberg Hates Warren's Plan to Break Up Facebook. She Doesn't Care.

For months, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has made “big, structural change” the rallying cry of her presidential campaign. And when it comes to the tech sector, that has meant taking square aim at giant companies like Facebook — companies she says have become so large that they are stifling competition.

At least two candidates used the same phrase: Both Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, who have been calling for Trump’s impeachment for months, labeled the reconstruction of the phone call a “smoking gun.”

“If this is the version of events the president’s team thinks is most favorable, he is in very deep jeopardy,” Warren said. “We need to see the full whistleblower complaint and the administration needs to follow the law. Now.”

The call between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine has been at the center of accusations that Trump pressured a foreign leader to open a potential corruption investigation tied to a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, who is seeking to challenge Trump in 2020.

According to the reconstructed transcript, which the White House released Wednesday morning, Trump urged Zelenskiy to contact Attorney General William Barr about opening an investigation connected to Biden, saying “whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”

The news of the call — which was first revealed by a whistleblower who works in the intelligence community — have prompted House Democrats to say they would formally open an impeachment inquiry. And Wednesday, after reviewing the contents of the reconstructed transcript, several Democratic candidates renewed their calls for Trump to be impeached.

“Congress should cancel recess and begin impeachment proceedings immediately,” Castro said.

Sen. Kamala Harris’ campaign highlighted an exchange during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May between Harris and Barr, in which she asked the attorney general whether Trump had ever asked him to open an investigation into anyone else. After much hesitation, Barr said he did not know.

Harris, D-Calif., posted a screen shot of the transcript on Twitter, writing, “They admit it: Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to work with the U.S. Attorney General to investigate a political opponent. He must be impeached.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said in a statement that the document released Wednesday amounted to “apparent proof that Trump had pressured a foreign nation to meddle in our democracy again.”

“History will remember those who put politics aside at this time of crisis and treated it like the moral moment that it is,” he said.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who has said she supports the impeachment inquiry, said that the record of the call was “deeply disturbing,” adding that Trump had “violated the public’s trust.”

Several other Democratic candidates for president, including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, renewed their calls for an impeachment inquiry to begin.

“Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in the modern history of this country,” Sanders tweeted, echoing a line he uses frequently on the campaign trail.

Biden said Tuesday that if Trump continued to stonewall attempts by Congress to investigate his conduct, he would “leave Congress no choice but to initiate impeachment.”

Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund manager who pledged to spend millions of dollars on a campaign to impeach Trump before entering the presidential race, was blunt Wednesday.

“There it is,” Steyer said. “He did it. Donald Trump is a traitor.”

2020 Democrats Say Trump's Call With Ukraine President Is a 'Smoking Gun'

Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for president in 2020 swiftly renewed their condemnation of President Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying that the remarks he made to the president of Ukraine during a July phone call constituted an impeachable offense.

“It’s time to trust ourselves more than our politicians,” Yang said during his opening statement as he made the announcement. “This is how we will get our country working for us again, the American people.”

But unlike earlier in his campaign, when Yang paid what he calls “freedom dividends” out of his own pocket to three families, his advisers said the money for the latest round of payments would be funded by campaign donations, raising questions about whether such a giveaway violates federal election law.

Campaign finance experts said that while federal rules prohibit campaigns from giving people anything of value as an incentive to vote, Yang would not be breaking the law in that area if he did not ask for people’s votes in return.

But Federal Election Commission rules do prohibit the use of campaign funds on personal expenses. To differentiate legitimate campaign expenses from personal expenses, regulators must determine whether the expense would exist even if the candidate were not running for office.

Yang’s campaign said late Thursday that the planned payments would pass legal muster because they would not exist if not for the campaign. The payments, his advisers added, were part of a broad effort to educate the public about Yang’s signature policy — a function directly tied to the campaign and allowed under the law.

“Normally when you give money to presidential campaigns, it goes to expensive consultants and ads,” Yang’s campaign said in a statement. “For the first time in history, a presidential campaign is going to give money back to the people.”

However, FEC rules specify that the personal use of campaign funds by “any person” is prohibited. And the families that would receive $12,000 over the course of a year from Yang would almost certainly spend the extra money on such expenses, which experts said could be problematic.

“Campaign donors give their hard-earned money to fund campaign activities, and the law makes clear that paying personal expenses is not a campaign activity,” said Adav Noti, former associate general counsel at the FEC. “When donors give, they have a reasonable expectation that their money will be used on a campaign and not on somebody’s car payment.”

Yang’s advisers said Thursday it was their understanding that the personal use statute applies only to a candidate and his campaign.

The $1,000 payments would begin sometime in the fall and would continue once a month for a year, regardless of whether Yang remained in the race for president, his campaign said. Advisers said they would ask people to apply for the dividends on the campaign website and would select the recipients based on their applications.

Yang’s campaign has framed the planned payments as an original idea never previously undertaken by a presidential candidate. One expert in campaign finance law said he could not recall a time when the FEC had been forced to consider the legality of a stipend like the one Yang is proposing.

“Andrew Yang’s use of campaign funds to give ‘freedom dividends’ to supporters would push the boundaries of, and perhaps break, campaign finance law,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization that promotes government accountability. “This unprecedented use of campaign funds would give rise to a bunch of novel legal questions.”

Yang’s advisers raised a similar point Thursday, noting that the unusual nature of the giveaway means that federal agencies have not yet issued a definitive ruling on its legality. However, they asserted that those agencies would find their arguments convincing.

Experts noted that every person who gets paid by a campaign in exchange for goods and services, or both — like caterers at a campaign event — eventually cashes their paycheck and uses the money for personal expenses, exercising a sort of “conversion” that the FEC does not prohibit. They suggested that to bolster his legal argument, Yang’s campaign could potentially ask the dividend recipients to perform tasks as a condition of getting the money and then argue that the payments are permissible because they represent compensation at market value. (Yang, however, has repeatedly said that the dividends he is proposing would be given out with no strings attached.)

Under normal circumstances, experts said, Yang’s campaign could have requested an advisory opinion from the FEC, but the resignation of one of its members last month left the agency one person short of a quorum. As a result, it is unable to take basic actions, including issuing opinions and levying fines for campaign finance violations.

But the FEC will not be frozen forever, and if Yang's payments run afoul of the rules, the agency could eventually investigate them.

Yang previously awarded a “freedom dividend” to an Iowa man caring for his mother, a family in New Hampshire and a Florida woman who retweeted one of his messages. His team has labeled the payments “trial runs” and has made clear that they were funded by Yang himself.

Yang has centered his campaign on the idea of providing Americans with a universal basic income of $1,000 a month as a way to soften the financial blow of what he refers to as the “fourth industrial revolution.” In essence, he argues that the automation of common jobs like truck driving and call center work will soon cause mass unemployment. And he believes that many of the stresses Americans feel — grievances he says caused them to vote for Donald. Trump in 2016 — are a result of deep insecurity about their jobs becoming obsolete and of being unable to afford basic living expenses.

His message has had enough staying power that Yang was one of only 10 candidates in the 20-person field to poll high enough and attract enough donors to qualify for Thursday’s debate. While he had not gotten as much speaking time as other candidates during earlier debates, he told The New York Times before Thursday night’s event that he would use whatever time he got to be “impactful.”

Andrew Yang Said He Would Give 10 People $1,000 Each Month. Is That Legal?

Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who has promised to provide every American adult with $1,000 a month if he is elected president, announced at the Democratic debate on Thursday that he would distribute such payments to 10 people for the next year.

“He was a meme — his campaign was a joke,” said Ben Longchamp, 20, a college student from Atkinson, New Hampshire, who first saw Yang speak in May, at a restaurant in Portsmouth. “I’ve seen 14 candidates at this point, and what I like about him is he has this one policy proposal, and he has the data to back it up.”

Shannon Jeanes, 44, a construction worker from Bedford, New Hampshire, said he was drawn to Yang because he seemed to care about ideas like a $1,000 “universal basic income” more than personal ambition. “He’s not running because he wants to be president,” Jeanes said. “He’s running because he feels he needs to be.”

One of the most surprising developments of the 2020 presidential race has been the intensely loyal and passionate following for Yang, a former entrepreneur and tech executive making a bid for the Democratic nomination. Armed with numbers, history lessons and the occasional self-deprecating joke, he has been preaching a grim gospel about how automation will lead to mass unemployment and how corporate profits are warping the economy. Enough Americans have started to take him seriously that Yang has emerged as the surprise qualifier for a slimmed-down third Democratic debate, which will be held Thursday in Houston.

Yang, 44, remains one of the least known candidates in a group that includes senators, mayors, a governor and a former vice president. He is far from the only one with policy chops. And he is, as ever, a long shot for the nomination, as evidenced by the fact that he is still polling in the low single digits.

But voters who attended his campaign events during a swing through New Hampshire last month rarely described him as a futurist fringe-candidate pitching a pie-in-the-sky plan. Instead, many said they had come to regard him as a smart, substantive and affable political outsider offering a thoughtful solution to an existential problem that other candidates have largely ignored.

More broadly, Yang’s supporters said they found his almost apolitical approach refreshing. Rather than participate in daily brinkmanship over immigration and gun control or level attacks on President Donald Trump, Yang has used his platform to gently lecture the country about the “fourth industrial revolution” — which he fears will put truck drivers, call-center workers and retail clerks out of work — and to offer universal basic income as a way to soothe the pain he says such a revolution will assuredly cause.

Yang has attracted an ideologically eclectic coalition that includes progressives, libertarians, disaffected voters and Trump supporters who have swapped their red MAGA hats for blue ones that say MATH — “Make America Think Harder.” Those who have come into his camp say his presence on YouTube, on podcasts and in the nationally televised debates helped them begin to see the logic behind giving people free money.

His performance in Houston could be crucial to sustaining his campaign’s newfound momentum. In the days immediately after the July debates, Yang’s campaign raked in about $1 million — more than a third of what his team had raised during the entirety of the second quarter. About 90% of the people who gave were new donors.

The campaign is now on track to raise more than $5.5 million in the third quarter of the year, according to Yang advisers — more than the total amount Yang had raised during the previous 20 months that he spent as a candidate. While his operation does not rival the size or scale of his more established rivals’ campaigns, his team has ballooned to over 50 staff members from around 10 initially, as new offices have opened in Nashua and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. At the New York headquarters, the campaign has leased additional office space and is building an in-house digital team.

Data compiled by RealClearPolitics shows that Yang is drawing about 2.6% support in national polls on average, good enough for sixth place, behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and just ahead of Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.

More and more, Yang and his advisers have allowed themselves to flirt openly with the idea that they have achieved something that long eluded them: mainstream recognition.

“I’ve been coming to New Hampshire every month for the last year-plus,” Yang, standing atop a soapbox, told a room packed with supporters at the christening of the Nashua office. “When I first showed up, honestly no one knew who I was. The growth from then to now — it’s staggering.”

Indeed, as recently as May, Yang strutted into a park in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to find only a few dozen voters waiting to meet him. Back then, those who showed up conveyed more curiosity than commitment.

Three months later, the situation had changed. Yang would ask his audience questions — Which state has passed universal basic income? — and a chorus of supporters would yell back the answer on cue: “Alaska!”

At his events in New Hampshire, those fans tended to skew largely white, slightly male and very young. Many of them were in college or had just graduated; a noticeable share described themselves as liking both Yang and Trump.

Still others leaned libertarian and praised Yang for his plan to give people money and then get out of the way. Some professed to be former supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, saying that they saw in Yang a newer, fresher champion of progressive causes who was advancing ideas that might prove to be ahead of their time.

Yang’s big-city rallies can draw thousands and tend to attract more diverse crowds, including an unusually high share of Asian Americans.

On the trail, Yang, like many of his rivals, likes to paint his campaign as one powered primarily by grassroots enthusiasm and modest donations. An analysis by The New York Times bore that out, finding that about 70% of donations he received in the second quarter of the year came from people giving $200 or less.

A separate analysis of Yang’s approximately 133,000 total donors through June 30 showed that the average contribution to his campaign was about $27. Because approximately 20% of his donors gave multiple times, the average amount received from each person was about $40.

The donor data also reinforced a demographic trend apparent at Yang’s campaign events: Less than 30% of his donors were women, according to estimates by OpenSecrets.com and The Times.

The crowds at Yang’s New Hampshire meet-and-greets also noticeably lacked older voters. Some who did attend said they wanted to hear Yang out, even though they professed to preferring someone who had logged more experience working in Washington.

Ann Engelkemeir, 67, of Epsom, New Hampshire, said she was leaning toward voting for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. But she and others said they found Yang personable and acknowledged that a core part of his appeal was that he was not a career politician.

“Some of the candidates, when they’re asked a question, they give the response they’ve practiced that is closest to the question,” Engelkemeir said at one event. “I do think he answers questions much more directly than I’ve heard.”

During that event, hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, Yang found himself in front of an audience full of voters who, like Engelkemeir, were largely unfamiliar with him.

He ticked off a comedic and at times ungenerous retelling of his backstory: unhappy corporate lawyer; founder of a business that experienced a “mini rise and maximum fall”; and eventually the leader of a test-preparation company that was bought by Kaplan in 2009.

Yang told The Washington Post Magazine this year that he “became a millionaire” after he sold the company, but stipulated that “my net worth is probably much lower than speculation would lead one to believe.” In financial disclosure forms filed this summer, Yang reported assets worth as much as $2.4 million, putting him on par with many other candidates in the race.

Amid the recession, Yang moved on to develop Venture for America, a nonprofit entrepreneurship organization for college graduates that created jobs in underserved cities.

When Trump was elected president in 2016, Yang says he started digging into data to try to understand why, and he found that millions of manufacturing jobs had been wiped out in swing states because of automation. It dawned on him that his good-faith effort to create jobs was wildly insufficient. A more sweeping solution was necessary: $1,000 a month for every American.

“Universal basic income is an amazingly hard policy to demonize,” said Matt Clark, 36, a college adviser from Massachusetts who supports the idea and believes Republicans will get behind it. “It’s super simple, and it directly addresses so many Americans.”

Yang’s fixation on enriching the masses, along with his history as an entrepreneur, has made his personal wealth a popular Google search. As Yang’s campaign has gained relevance, his sources of income have come under increasing scrutiny.

Yang’s financial disclosure forms show that he received a total of $94,000 for 10 speeches he gave between April 2018 and February 2019; five of the paid speeches were to JPMorgan Chase at a rate of $10,000 each. They also show that Yang draws tens of thousands of dollars in income from interest and capital gains on his investments as well as rent for a home he owns in New Paltz, New York.

A spokesman for Yang said the candidate would release his tax returns in the coming days. He declined to disclose Yang’s net worth or comment on his paid speeches.

Although Yang has been reluctant to discuss his wealth, he has been candid about other aspects of his personal life. Some voters said they were particularly struck by the humanity they saw come through when Yang spoke about his son who has autism and his wife’s dedication as a stay-at-home mother while he has been out on the trail.

(Yang also drew attention when he recently broke down in tears at a forum on gun violence in Iowa after a mother shared that her child had been killed by a stray bullet.)

Matthew Martin, 35, a gardener from Salem, Massachusetts, is among those who said he was touched by Yang’s empathy. Both of Martin’s parents were factory workers who lost their jobs several times, so when he first heard Yang give his pitch on a podcast, he felt drawn to his message.

Now, more than a year after Martin first learned about Yang, he was standing inside his new office in Nashua. As Yang signed MATH hats and took selfies a few steps away, Martin mused about how the campaign had grown and why he had traveled to be a part of it.

“It’s very hard at first to get people on board with Andrew Yang,” he said. “But after they listen, it can be transformative.”

Andrew Yang's Quest to 'Make America Think Harder'

PLAISTOW, N.H. — Meet Andrew Yang supporters and they often have a confession to make: When they first heard about Yang, they thought his plan to give every American adult $1,000 a month was a little crazy. But then, they will inevitably tell you, they heard him explain it, and it all started making sense.

The poll, conducted for CNN by SSRS, a research firm, was the fourth qualifying poll to show Castro having cleared that hurdle. He had already met the other qualifying standard set by the Democratic National Committee by receiving donations from more than 130,000 people.

In qualifying for the third set of debates, Castro joins nine other candidates who have also done so: former Vice President Joe Biden; Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana; Sen. Kamala Harris of California; Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas; Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont; Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

“With two standout debate performances, Secretary Castro has been building momentum for his candidacy,” his campaign manager, Maya Rupert, said in a statement. “He has never wanted to be a ‘flash in the pan’ candidate, but rather has continued to build support and momentum by leading the field on critical issues and showing voters every day why he’s the best candidate to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump.”

Candidates are required to both have 130,000 unique donors and register at least 2% support in four polls in order to make the cut for the next debates, scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13 in Houston — though it is not yet clear whether there will be one night of debates or two. The candidates have until Aug. 28 to reach those bench marks.

All of the candidates who qualify for the debate stage in September will also make the cut for the following round of debates, in October.

Castro, who is also a former mayor of San Antonio, released a new ad last week in which he sharply criticized Trump and accused him of inspiring the mass shooting in El Paso this month that left 22 people dead. The ad aired on Fox News in Bedminster, New Jersey, while Trump was vacationing there, and shortly before the CNN poll was conducted.

The new CNN poll also helped Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii inch closer to debate qualification. Like Castro, she earned 2% support in the poll, leaving her just two surveys short of meeting the DNC’s standard; she has already surpassed the donor threshold. Gabbard left the trail last week in order to fulfill her obligations with the National Guard and is scheduled to resume campaign activities this Sunday.

Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund investor turned impeachment activist, needs only one more qualifying poll to make the cut for the debates, having already met the donor standard. When he entered the race in July, his team said he planned to spend at least $100 million on the race. In the weeks since, he has spent millions of dollars on internet and television ads that have helped him attract donors. He received 1% support in Tuesday’s CNN poll.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who received less than 1% support in Tuesday’s poll, is the only other candidate still shy of making the cut who has earned 2% support in any qualifying poll. She has amassed more than 100,000 individual donors.

No other lower-tier candidate in the 23-person field is particularly close to making the debate stage. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington announced Monday that he had crossed the 130,000 donor threshold, but he needs to earn 2% support in four polls in the next week to qualify.

And Tuesday, self-help author Marianne Williamson announced that she had also met the donor requirement, but like Inslee, she needs to earn 2% in four qualifying polls.

Castro, who has focused his campaign around issues like education and immigration, was buoyed by a strong performance in the first debate. He confronted O’Rourke over his immigration policy and argued for decriminalizing border crossings — a stance many of his rivals have since adopted.

Castro saw an uptick in fundraising after the first debate, but his performance in polling has continued to hover in the low single digits.

The CNN poll released Tuesday had Biden in the lead with 29% of Democrats or Democratic-leaning voters selecting him as their first choice for the nomination. Sanders finished next with 15% support, essentially tied with Warren, who had 14%.

Buttigieg and Harris came in next, both with 5% support. Harris had earned 17% support when the CNN survey was last conducted in late June, immediately following a standout performance in the first debate.

The poll was conducted Aug. 15-18 and surveyed 402 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who are registered to vote. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 6 percentage points.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/politics/julian-castro-debate-2020.html" id="5d917d67-b2e6-3779-a08b-f2e193d85989">The New York Times</a>.

Julián Castro Is the 10th Candidate to Qualify for the Next Democratic Debate

Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, on Tuesday became the 10th Democratic presidential candidate to qualify for the next round of debates, after a new national poll showed him earning 2% support.

Hickenlooper Exits and Mulls a Senate Run

On Tuesday, my colleague Reid J. Epstein reported that former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado was talking to Democrats about ending his presidential bid and entering the race for his state’s Republican-held Senate seat.

Two days later, Hickenlooper announced his 2020 campaign was over. And he left the door open to a Senate run.

Colorado is a purple battleground state, and flipping the seat currently held by Sen. Cory Gardner is all but mandatory if Democrats hope to have any chance of retaking the Senate.

Recent polling showed Hickenlooper with a more than 50-point lead over the current Democratic front-runners in the Senate race; it also showed him ahead of Gardner by 13 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup. But Hickenlooper, like some other candidates in the presidential race, has not professed enthusiasm about a down-ballot contest.

Hickenlooper is the second candidate to withdraw from the Democratic presidential field since it expanded significantly in the spring; Rep. Eric Swalwell of California exited the race in July.

O’Rourke Tries the Reset Button

After 22 people were shot to death at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart this month, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke quickly returned to his hometown to grieve with and support his friends and neighbors.

Soon, a fiercer presidential candidate emerged. O’Rourke called President Donald Trump a white supremacist and angrily urged journalists to “connect the dots” between the El Paso killings and Trump’s anti-immigrant language.

And while some Democrats expressed support for his White House bid, others took note of his campaign’s struggles and pressed O’Rourke to focus on Texas and run against Sen. John Cornyn in the 2020 election.

But in an interview with The Times’ Katie Glueck, O’Rourke said he was even more determined to pursue the Democratic nomination and oppose Trump.

On Thursday, his campaign announced a reset.

O’Rourke told my colleague Alex Burns that he would abandon the relatively traditional approach he had taken and instead plan his political activities around taking on Trump in direct and personal terms.

“I just have to be as clear and as strong as possible in calling this out and taking the fight to Donald Trump,” O’Rourke said.

Stacey Abrams Says She Is Not Running for President, But ...

Stacey Abrams, who drew national attention during her unsuccessful run for governor of Georgia last year, made it official this week: She will not run for president in 2020.

But in an interview Tuesday night with The Times’ Astead W. Herndon, she said she was open to being considered for vice president by “any nominee.”

Abrams said she would focus her next year on identifying and stemming voter suppression efforts throughout the country. But she has remained close to the presidential race, meeting privately with several candidates.

“I’ve been thinking about this for the last few weeks,” she said, “and I’ve just come to the decision that my best value add, the strongest contribution I can give to this primary, would be to make sure our nominee is coming into an environment where there’s strong voter protections in place.”

Recapping the Weekend in Iowa

Our reporters seemed to be in every corner of Iowa last weekend — at the state fair, at a gun violence forum and elsewhere — keeping tabs on the 20 Democrats who had come to do some retail politicking in the key early voting state.

Here’s a roundup of some of what they reported:

— At a forum in Des Moines, the candidates voiced support for a common set of gun control proposals, like requiring universal background checks and banning military-style semi-automatic rifles.

— At the state fair, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont “examined the butter cow” and “gobbled a corn dog” but, as my colleague Sydney Ember put it, “spoke to almost no one” as he walked around. (Like others, he did draw a large crowd for his political speech.) Sanders’ approach underscored how he has grounded his campaign in championing ideas rather than establishing human connections.

A New Proposal to Tax the Rich

A Democratic candidate heartily endorsed new taxes on the wealthiest Americans this week. And no, it was not Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or Sanders.

Former housing secretary Julián Castro rolled out his expansive “People First Economic Plan for Working Families” on Thursday, a suite of new proposals aimed at providing relief to working families. A pair of new wealth taxes would help fund the commitments and are central to the plan.

The first, an “inherited wealth tax,” would replace the estate and gift taxes with a federal tax on inherited incomes of more than $2 million. Castro’s team said such a tax would raise more than $250 billion over 10 years.

The second tax, a “wealth inequality tax,” would apply to the top tenth of the top 1% of earners. Under the tax, capital income would be treated the same as labor income.

Castro also promised to repeal the tax cuts passed under the Trump administration, to more than double the child tax credit to $3,000 and to increase the earned-income tax credit.

Among the other Democrats calling for new taxes on the richest Americans, Warren has proposed a wealth tax that would target the 75,000 wealthiest families in the United States and levy an additional surtax on billionaires. Sanders has introduced legislation that would increase the number of wealthy Americans subject to the estate tax.

In Other Policy News:

— Warren released her plan on curbing gun violence. She said she would use the president’s executive powers to require background checks and close loopholes. She also promised to send Congress legislation that would create a federal gun licensing system, ban assault weapons and increase taxes on gun manufacturers, among other measures.

— Warren also put forth a policy agenda aimed at supporting Native American communities, ahead of a scheduled appearance Monday at a presidential forum on Native American issues. Her campaign has been dogged by the controversy over her claims of Native American ancestry.

— Sen. Kamala Harris of California said that if elected, she would take executive action to require major online gun sales platforms to perform background checks. She also pledged to create a “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Order,” which would allow law enforcement officials to petition a federal court to temporarily seize the gun of a suspected terrorist.

— Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, released a plan for rural America in which he promised to fund “innovation clusters,” apprenticeship programs and a public-private partnership that would help train manufacturing entrepreneurs. The plan also calls for an “internet for all” initiative, higher salaries for teachers at rural schools and a “rural opportunity center” that would streamline the grant process in rural communities.

— Entrepreneur Andrew Yang unveiled a plan aimed at “restoring democracy.” He said he would eliminate super PACs and provide every American voter with $100 in “Democracy Dollars” that could be used to support any candidate. He also argued for ranked-choice voting, an end to partisan gerrymandering, term limits and other measures.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/us/politics/2020-democrats-hickenlooper-orourke.html" id="f27743d4-7cbd-3e66-ad01-a42ee0598c51">The New York Times</a>.

Hickenlooper Exits as O'Rourke Presses On: This Week in the 2020 Race

Here’s our quick weekly catch-up on the presidential campaign and the field of 24 — well, make that 23 — candidates for the Democratic nomination.

King, who represents a deeply conservative district in northwest Iowa, made the remarks to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, as he explained his opposition to exceptions for rape and incest in anti-abortion legislation.

“It’s not the baby’s fault,” King said in video of the comments published by The Des Moines Register, which first reported the story.

“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that? Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that’s taken place, and whatever happened to culture after society, I know that I can’t certify that I’m not a product of that. And I’d like to think every one of the lives of us are as precious as any other life.”

A spokesman for King did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

King’s latest remarks come just over a week after J.D. Scholten, a Democrat who nearly defeated him in 2018, announced that he would run again for King’s congressional seat in 2020. King defeated Scholten by just 10,000 votes in November.

“Yet again, Steve King puts his selfish, hateful ideology above the needs of the people of Iowa’s 4th district,” Scholten said in a statement Wednesday. “Excusing violence — in any way — is entirely unacceptable.

“His comments are disrespectful to survivors and don’t reflect Iowan values,” Scholten added.

During his nine terms in Congress, King has publicly promoted white nationalists and neo-Nazis on Twitter and frequently insulted immigrants. He once famously said that for every child of an immigrant in the country illegally who becomes a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

He was stripped of his congressional committee assignments earlier this year by House Republicans after he questioned why white supremacism was offensive. A number of powerful party leaders, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, suggested he should resign, and the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution disapproving of King’s statements.

King has insisted that his comments were misunderstood.

Two months later, in March, King came under scrutiny again when he said he did not “have an answer” when asked directly whether he believed a white society to be superior to a nonwhite society.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/politics/steve-king-rape-incest.html" id="e0c6dad1-6825-3d22-aaa5-9e11ef09c39e">The New York Times</a>.

Steve King Asks if There Would Be 'Any Population' Left Without Rape and Incest

Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a Republican whose history of making racist and divisive remarks led him to be stripped of his committee assignments earlier this year, questioned Wednesday if there would “be any population of the world left” if it were not for rape and incest.

Yang had already met the Democratic National Committee’s other debate-qualification threshold by having drawn donations from more than 130,000 people. The new poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, conducted by Monmouth University, was the fourth qualifying poll to show him with 2% support.

Candidates are required to both have 130,000 unique donors and register at least 2% support in four polls in order to make the cut for the next debates, scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13 in Houston. They have until Aug. 28 to reach those bench marks.

In qualifying for the third round of debates, Yang joins former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The former housing secretary Julián Castro has also surpassed 130,000 donors and needs to garner 2% support in just one more poll to qualify.

The entrepreneur and former tech executive Andrew Yang became the ninth Democratic presidential candidate to qualify for the next debates after a new poll of Iowa voters released Thursday showed him earning 2% support.

Matt Stevens

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