The New York Times editorial board announced Sunday evening that it would endorse two candidates for president for the first time in the newspaper’s history: Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota received the paper’s support.
The Times’s editorial board interviewed nine of the top candidates last month for in-depth interviews and documented the process of how they settled on the double endorsement in the paper’s documentary show “The Weekly” on FX.
The paper’s endorsement of Warren, senator from Massachusetts, and Klobuchar, senator from Minnesota, comes just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses on February 3.
The Times remarked that the similarities between the platforms of progressive Democrats, embodied by Warren, and more moderate Democrats like Klobuchar became “striking” during the course of their interviews and influenced the paper’s decision to embrace candidates who embody both flanks of the party.
“Some in the party view President Trump as an aberration and believe that a return to a more sensible America is possible,” the Times wrote in is announcement. “Then there are those who believe that President Trump was the product of political and economic systems so rotten that they must be replaced.”
The Times chose not to endorse the current front runner for the Democratic nomination, former vice president Joe Biden, saying that Biden’s agenda of “merely restoring the status quo will not get America where it needs to go as a society,” and it is time for him to “pass the torch.”
The paper also declined to endorse progressive Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, now in second place behind Biden, calling him “over-promising” and “divisive.”
The Times’ final four candidates included Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who suspended his campaign earlier this month, and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
Warren polls in third place nationally, while Klobuchar, although popular in Minnesota, has struggled to break out and currently polls at 3 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls.