Sunday, 26 May 2024

Eric Holder Won’t Run for President, Saying He’ll Fight Gerrymandering Instead

Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general, announced on Monday that he would not run for president in 2020 and would instead work to end gerrymandering.

“Though I will not run for president in 2020, I will continue to fight for the future of our country through the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates,” Mr. Holder wrote in an opinion article published on Monday in The Washington Post.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, formed in 2017 under Mr. Holder, aims to contest a combination of governorships, legislative seats and more obscure state offices to chip away at Republicans’ control of the redistricting process.

Mr. Holder said in a February 2018 interview with The New York Times that the group was mainly focused on denying Republicans in state governments from achieving what is known as a trifecta — a single party controlling the governorship and an entire legislature, as Republicans do in Ohio and Florida, among other critical battlegrounds.

In The Washington Post, Mr. Holder wrote that he vowed to “do everything I can to ensure that the next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by members from gerrymandered districts.”

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So far 14 Democrats are officially planning a run for the White House. Mr. Holder did not say which candidate he planned to endorse.

“With the depth and diversity of the current field of candidates (and those who may still join), we will have a host of good options,” he wrote, adding that some of the most important issues to address included universal health coverage, immigration reform and climate change.

He left few hints as to his ideal candidate, but did emphasize that age should not be a deciding factor.

“In evaluating potential nominees, we should remember that creativity is not limited to the young, nor wisdom to those who are older,” Mr. Holder wrote. “We must measure our candidates not by their age, but by the vitality of their ideas.”

Mr. Holder also wrote that it was fundamental to ensure elections are “free from foreign interference,” and accused the Republican Party of using “voter ID laws, gerrymandering and purging of the voter rolls” to undermine the right to cast ballots in fair elections, “while doing nothing to protect our electoral system from another foreign attack.”

Mr. Holder, 68, who left public service in 2015 after serving for six years under President Barack Obama as the nation’s first African-American attorney general, was considered unlikely to pursue the presidency despite having emerged as a vocal critic of President Trump.

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