Former San Antonio mayor was the last Southerner left in the 2020 contest
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com
SAN ANTONIO (CFP) — Julián Castro, the last Southerner and the only Latino in the 2020 presidential race, has ended his campaign for the White House.
“With only a month until the Iowa caucuses, and given the circumstances of this campaign season, I’ve determined that it simply isn’t our time,” Castro said in a video message to his supporters that he ended with the phrase “Ganaremos un día.” (One day, we’ll win.)
Julián Castro
Castro, who served as mayor of San Antonio and as housing secretary in the Clinton administration, also called for the Democratic Party to change its nominating process, which he said he believes disadvantages candidates of color.
In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” Castro criticized starting the process in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire “that lack people of color ” and was also critical of the caucus process used in Iowa.
“If you didn’t know anything about the Iowa caucuses, and I told you, look, this is how we’re going to start this process — you can only vote on one day at 7 o’clock in the evening, there’s no early voting, there’s no secret ballot … people would think that Republicans designed the Iowa caucuses,” he said.
While Castro was polling poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, he was also polling in low single digits nationally and in other early voting states such as Nevada and South Carolina that are more racially and ethnically diverse.
Castro was one of just three Southerners who entered the 2020 race. The other two — Democrat Beto O’Rourke from Texas and Republican Mark Sanford from South Carolina — had previously ended their campaigns.
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