After Julián Castro announced he was suspending his presidential campaign, Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) campaign saw a fundraising opportunity.
On Thursday, Booker’s campaign sent out a fundraising email decrying the news that “yet another candidate of color” dropped out of what was once the most diverse primary field in history.
Booker warned that while “talented, experienced, qualified candidates” are dropping out of the race, “billionaires with bottomless checkbooks” appear to have a path to the nomination,
“Here’s the reality: It seems like billionaires with bottomless checkbooks have a clearer path to the nomination than talented, experienced, qualified candidates like Julian Castro.”
Booker sends fundraising plea on Castro's exit from the race: "Julián Castro announced that he is ending his campaign for president — becoming yet another person of color exiting a field of candidates that began as the most diverse in our nation’s history." pic.twitter.com/bgiUOD1VEG
— Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe) January 2, 2020
The email calls Castro’s departure a “loss for our party and this nomination process” and ends with an appeal for donations to support Booker — one of the few candidates of color still in the running for the nomination.
Booker has raised concerns about a lack of diversity in the primary field before, arguing that the primary process is unfairly hurting minority candidates’ chances of winning the nomination.
After Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) suspended her campaign, Booker criticized the Democratic National Committee’s qualifications for the debates and called for a change to the nomination process.
Because of the DNC’s ever-increasing requirements, Booker said during a campaign event, voters are “being denied” the candidates they want before they’ve had a chance to vote in a primary.
Additionally, Castro had previously called for a change in the primary schedule so that the first two states to hold caucuses or primaries are not primarily white.
Billionaire Tom Steyer also chimed in, calling for the DNC to lower its debate requirements so that voters can hear from a “diverse group of candidates before they select our nominee.”
Neither Castro nor Booker qualified for the last Democratic debate. Instead, Andrew Yang was the only candidate of color to make it onto the debate stage.
Yet, despite calls for the DNC to relax its debate requirements amid concerns that voters would wind up with an all-white primary field, the DNC announced in December that it would raise its requirements ahead of the January debate.