With no end in sight in the foreseeable future concerning the partial government shutdown, Democrat candidates are already positioning themselves to take on President Trump in the upcoming 2020 Presidential election.
This week, Julian Castro and Kristen Gillibrand announced that they were running in the Democrat primaries. And, if either should move on to the general election to face President Trump, one important battleground state for them to win over is the sunshine state.
While President Trump won Florida and its 29 electoral college votes in the 2016 Presidential election, Democrats are going to continue to make a push in the state.
In the 2018 midterm election, Democrats took back the House, but they also ended up on the losing end in some high-profile races across the country. But, that doesn’t mean that the candidates haven’t gained some traction as a result.
One such candidate is Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who recently commented that he will be involved in the upcoming election to make sure that the President does not successfully carry the sunshine state to his reelection effort.
“In this period of time, whatever resources that I raise and time and energy I spend in this state is going to be around voter registration and deep-level engagement, so that when we have a nominee, we have an apparatus we can turn on,” Mayor Gillum said, knocking down any idea that he would make a run for the Presidency.
Speaking on his own run to become Florida’s next Governor, Gillum added that his campaign “had over 70,000 individuals who took an action in support of my candidacy, over a million good, live cellphone numbers where people opened up communications with us, and we had several communications back and forth; over a million email addresses and hard assets that we built over the course of my race that I have no intentions of allowing to go dormant when we have a presidential election in 2020.”
