Cory Booker�s Iowa senior adviser is departing his 2020 presidential campaign, leaving the New Jersey senator without one of his top staffers in a key early voting state.
Iowa senior adviser Joe O�Hern confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday that he had stepped down from the campaign last week for personal reasons. O�Hern was Martin O�Malley�s caucus director in 2016, managed a Democratic gubernatorial primary campaign in 2018 and is widely known among Iowa�s political class as a seasoned organizer with a deep understanding of the caucus process.
Booker�s campaign declined to comment on the departure.
While O�Hern was a key staffer on Booker�s Iowa team, Booker�s campaign has long been seen as one of the strongest on the ground in Iowa, a state that remains a top priority for his presidential campaign.
The candidate hired some of the state�s top political staffers and started organizing earlier than many of the top-polling candidates in the state. But he�s struggled to gain traction in both Iowa and national polls.
A recent USA Today/Suffolk University survey of likely Iowa caucusgoers � the only one taken since the first Democratic primary debate � found Booker polling at 2% support in the state. Nationally, he fares about the same in recent polling.
That does mean Booker has met one qualification to appear at the September DNC-hosted primary debates � drawing 2% support in four qualifying national polls. But he has yet to hit the 130,000 unique donations that candidates need to fully qualify for the debate. Booker said a week ago his campaign was just 15,000 donors short of that mark.
While his campaign saw a slight drop-off in fundraising from his first quarter in the race, it announced Monday that it had raised $4.5 million in the second quarter, with $5.4 million cash on hand.
(AP)
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My prayer – may all these DemocRats experience unending disappointments and downfalls. They embrace the extremes of immorality and dishonesty. Their divisiveness only proves that point. I pray the rest of them have similar failures wherever they go.