We don’t seem to have seen a lot of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the 2020 nomination coverage lately. That might be the cumulative result of her RCP polling average sitting at 0.6 right now and never really having gotten much above one. It could be the fact that she barely raised two million dollars in the second quarter. Or maybe it was the beer pong that didn’t involve any actual beer. Who knows?

The bottom line here is that this candidacy is seriously looking like a wounded animal searching for a dry place to go curl up and await the end. And some people have definitely noticed and are talking about it. According to the Daily Caller, these people include two of her former staffers and one personal friend. And they all seem to think it’s time to call the time of death and pull the plug.

At least two former staffers and one friend to New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand say it is time for the lawmaker to quit the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

One former aide even went so far as to describe the senator’s performance in the Democratic presidential debates as “performative and obnoxious,” according to the New York Post.

“I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious,” said the ex-staffer who worked in Gillibrand’s Senate office.

Wow. Everyone finds her “performative and obnoxious?” That’s gonna leave a mark.

Also worth noting is that Gillibrand has thus far still not met the threshold of 130,000 individual donors needed to bet on the debate stage next month. Word on the street is that you can now get a $30 campaign t-shirt for one dollar if you are a first time donor. Assuming, you know… if that’s the sort of thing you might buy.

So what happened? These people talking about her obnoxious nature on stage are supposedly her friends and former colleagues, but I don’t think they’re hitting the mark here. Plenty of obnoxious people have gone a long way in politics, even if you agree that describes her personality. Also, some of them are talking about her campaign “collapsing.” The Gillibrand campaign can’t collapse because it never rose up from the dust in the first place.

No, I think what we observed in this little saga was something I pointed out when she first formed her exploratory committee. The Democratic base never had any reason to get fired up about Gillibrand because she couldn’t pass the purity test. It’s still only been a decade or so since the days when she was pro-gun, anti-immigration congresswoman and enough of a blue dog to earn her the moniker of being “a weird version of Sarah Palin.”

Sure, she says all of her views magically changed overnight when she was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s old Senate seat. Now she’s part of the clan, pushing the most liberal policies imaginable. But the Democrats have a huge batch of candidates to pick from who embraced those policies for their entire careers. Why trust the Johnny-Come-Lately lady from New York who might flip flop back in the other direction any day now?

Anyway, that’s just my two cents. In the end, the reason may not really matter. The fact is that this campaign never got off the ground and she’s not doing enough to justify continually asking supporters to keep betting more money on a horse that’s stuck at the back of the pack.