Campaigning from behind: Lower-tier 2020ers seek comeback

FLINT, Mich. — As her campaign bus trundled along Interstate 80 toward the Michigan-Ohio border, Kirsten Gillibrand was offering wedding planning advice to one of her presidential campaign staffers who recently got engaged. “I think I shook Hickenlooper’s hand today,” noted Laura Bergus, a candidate for city council in Iowa City, referring to the former Colorado governor. Asked in an interview during a stop in Flint if the bus tour will help her break out in a way her women’s rights advocacy couldn’t, Gillibrand didn’t dispute the premise, but said, “I think it’s more than that.” “I think I’m showing, by what I’m doing and saying and the ideas that I have, that I can beat President Trump,” she said at a small-plates restaurant in a city whose drinking water crisis became a national scandal. Even amid her bus tour decrying Trump, Gillibrand noted during the interview that “both parties have been compromising on women’s health for decades.” At a town hall inside the Cleveland Public Library, she went further, asking about 20 attendees, “Do we value women? Afterward, Warshawsky called Gillibrand “terrific” but said of her chances in the primary, “I don’t have an answer yet on how she’s going to get through.” ___ Associated Press writer Alexandra Jaffe in Manchester, Iowa, contributed to this report.