Vivian Wang reports in The New York Times about Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's first stop as a presidential candidate, at the the Country View Diner in Troy, near where she is setting up a campaign headquarters. Just three months earlier, Gillibrand promised to complete her senate term. “As I said then, I was solely focused on winning our midterms, creating transparency and accountability over this White House,” she said on Jan. 16. “I continue to fight for New Yorkers as I’ve always done, but I believe the urgency of this moment now is we have to take on President Trump and what he is doing.” The FiveThirtyEight.com website, in an article titled "How Kirsten Gillibrand Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary," touched on her local history as this area's Congressional representative. "Her political career began in 2007 in the House, where she served an upstate congressional district. Gillibrand’s political positions at the time were much more conservative, and she was among the least liberal members of the Democratic caucus in the House, ranking 209th out of 241 during her 2007-09 term. She held an 'A' rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. When Gillibrand was appointed to [Hillary] Clinton’s Senate seat, some on the left were outraged. But she made a quick switch in her ideology, embracing a range of liberal policies and seeing her NRA rating downgraded to an 'F.' As of December 2017, she was the seventh-most liberal member of the 46-person Democratic caucus," the website reported.