Good evening, Team Pete,

I joined this race in the belief that becoming the Democratic nominee was the best way for me to ensure that we defeat Donald Trump and usher in a new kind of politics defined by bringing people together.

At this point in the race, the best way to keep faith with those goals and with the ideals our campaign has been built around is to step aside and help bring our party and our country together. So tonight I am making the difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the presidency.

I will no longer seek to be the 2020 Democratic nominee for president. But I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure that we have a Democratic president come January.

I cannot express how grateful I am for you. How grateful I am for every supporter, every volunteer, and every staffer who believed in what we were building.

So many of you dug deep to fuel this campaign, joining nearly a million grassroots donors so that this message of hope and belonging could reach every corner of this country.

Online, in person, with family and friends and complete strangers, you shared your personal stories, and you made the life of this campaign part of your own.

What you did -- and the way you did it -- let us show, not just tell, the kind of campaign we could be and the kind of country we will build. You made me proud every day.

In a field in which some two dozen Democratic candidates ran for president -- billionaires, sitting senators, and governors, a former vice president -- we achieved a top-four finish in each of the first four states to hold early contests and made history winning those Iowa caucuses.

That we made it here at all is proof that Americans are hungry for a new kind of politics, rooted in the values we share.

In a moment of deep division, we saw a rising American majority of Democrats, joined by Independents, and, yes, some of those future former Republicans, choose a politics defined not by who we push out, but by how many we call in; not by who we exclude, but by how we help people belong.

With every passing day, I am more and more convinced that the only way we will defeat Trump and Trumpism is with that politics that gathers people together.

And I urge everyone who supported me or ever even considered it, to be prepared to do everything we can to support the eventual nominee -- and the absolutely critical down-ballot races playing out across the country. There is simply too much at stake to retreat to the sidelines.

I know many will be disappointed that this campaign will not go on. I know it’s easy to get frustrated with politics, especially at this moment.

But this is the moment of all moments to insist that we make our politics what it could be. As I’ve said before -- at its best, politics can be magnificent. Because it’s not just about policy, it is soulcraft. And it is moral.

And we don’t have to win the nomination to be part of that. I don’t have to become the president in order to support that. We don’t have to win Super Tuesday for my campaign to do our part to win the era for our values.

And we walk on in the knowledge that better leadership is possible. That if we reach for it, if we work for it, if we hold that hope in our hearts and fire in our bellies, then one day we will stand in the future we create, a future where every American is empowered and everyone belongs.

Thank you.

Pete