Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar has announced she is running for president in the 2020 election.
Ms Klobuchar, a former prosecutor, said she was running for “everyone who wanted their work recognised”.
She won praise for grilling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and attorney general nominee William Barr during recent confirmation hearings.
The 58-year-old enters an increasingly crowded field of Democrats competing to challenge President Donald Trump.
Ms Klobuchar called on people to join her “home-grown” campaign, saying, “I don’t have a political machine. I don’t come from money. But what I do have is this: I have grit.”
A record total of five women have so far entered the race for the presidency – these also include Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kirsten Gillibrand.
On her first full day of presidential campaigning, Ms Warren – a senator from Massachusetts – told supporters: “By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be president. In fact, he may not even be a free person.”
After working as a lawyer in a private firm, she became chief prosecutor for Hennepin, Minnesota’s most populous county, in 1998.
Eight years later, she was elected to the Senate to represent Minnesota.
Ms Klobuchar has long prided herself in her bipartisanship; on being able to, as she wrote in her 2015 memoir, “disagree without being disagreeable”.
“Courage is about whether or not you’re willing to stand next to someone you don’t always agree with for the betterment of this country,” she wrote
It is this approach that has given her a reputation for being “Minnesota nice” – but it also, in her early years, reportedly earned her the unflattering nickname “Cotton Candy Amy” in some circles.
