2020 not so far away

In Kamala Harris, a sequel to Ronald Reagan?

Gov. Jay Inslee entered the 2020 presidential race Friday, launching a longshot campaign with a focused message that he’s the only candidate who would make defeating climate change the nation’s top priority.

In a short video announcing his candidacy, Inslee repeats what has become his signature slogan in recent years: “We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we’re the last that can do something about it.”


Over images of fire-scorched landscapes and flooding, Inslee said the nation must rise to the challenge, portraying a clean-energy revolution as a potential win for the economy and the environment.

Bernie Sanders pledges to support whoever the Democratic nominee is in 2020 to defeat Trump, but hopes it'll be him

White House Ambitions Cloud Democratic Hopes to Win the Senate

March 2, 2019

WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders are convinced that Steve Bullock, the popular governor of Montana, would give the party its best shot at unseating Senator Steve Daines, a freshman Republican, when he stands for re-election next year in a state that President Trump carried by 20 points.

But Mr. Bullock has a bigger — if far less attainable — aspiration: running for president.

And so it has gone for Democratic leaders as they struggle to recruit a solid slate of candidates that they will need to net the three or four seats necessary to take control of the Senate next year. Four top-tier potential Democratic Senate candidates — John Hickenlooper in Colorado, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Mr. Bullock — are seriously exploring presidential campaigns, forsaking statewide campaigns within their grasp, at least for now, for a national one that would be the longest of long shots.

A fifth potential recruit, Richard Ojeda, resigned his State Senate seat in West Virginia to run for president, only to withdraw last month — without committing to challenge Senator Shelley Moore Capito.

“This isn’t a bad map like 2018 because we have very few seats to defend,” said Guy Cecil, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “But the opportunities to pick up seats are limited, and we need the best candidates possible to win the majority. It’s critical that some of the long shots in the presidential primary consider the Senate this year.”

Party leaders, guided by Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, the committee chairwoman, believe they need to nail down Mr. Bullock, and top recruits like him, if they have any chance of riding an anti-Trump wave to Senate control. But it hasn’t been easy.

The Democratic Party’s bench is shallow in states that have been dominated by Republicans, like Georgia, Montana, North Carolina and Texas. It is rare for the party to have first-class candidates in such states, let alone talents like Ms. Abrams, Mr. Bullock and Mr. O’Rourke. And getting them to stay at home has proved nearly impossible.

Mr. Bullock has told people around him that he has absolutely no intention of running for anything other than the White House, and is concerned about the strain on his family. His wife, Lisa Downs Bullock, a mathematician by training and mother of three, has told friends that she would relocate to Washington only if they were moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, according to two people familiar with their plans.

“He’s got the skills to be a really good president,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana — sticking his buzz cut head out of a Senate elevator last week to make one final point. “But, you know, I think he’s got the skills to be a really good senator, too.”

It is still early — Mr. Schumer, the Democratic leader, told Mr. Bullock last month, “you can always change your mind” if presidential aspirations do not pan out, according to aides briefed on the exchange.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, has been trying to recruit Democrats to challenge vulnerable Republicans for Senate seats in 2020.

There is plenty of precedent for that. Successful Senate candidates have announced their intention to run as late as the summer before an election. Marco Rubio retired from the Senate to run for president in 2016, left retirement after that campaign fizzled and easily won re-election that fall.

But for the coming Senate campaign, few years have been as unpredictable as 2020. The possibilities for Democrats range from a one-seat loss to a six-seat gain, according to pollsters and consultants working on races. That the Democrats are hosting the most crowded presidential casting call in a generation is not helping.

The latest new wild card: Ms. Abrams, believed to have been considering a second run for governor of Georgia, is seriously examining a Senate or presidential campaign. She will make an announcement by mid-April, according to a person with direct knowledge of her planning.

Revulsion toward Mr. Trump among the Democratic base led to a flood of House candidates last year, putting in play Republican House seats that Democrats had not sought in years. The same rage has produced 15 declared presidential candidates for 2020 so far.

But that flood has yet to materialize in Senate races, which many recruits consider costly, exhausting and unglamorous.

Mr. Schumer and Ms. Cortez Masto have had some victories. Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut who is married to former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, is challenging Senator Martha McSally, Republican of Arizona, who was appointed to the seat vacated after the death of John McCain. Mr. Schumer is confident that he will have a strong recruit to challenge Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who has been hugely popular in her state but is facing headwinds in a more partisan political environment.

But they have had some failures. This week, Mr. O’Rourke let it be known that he would not challenge Senator John Cornyn next year in Texas, shrugging off Mr. Schumer’s dogged recruitment efforts. Public polling in recent days has indicated that Mr. O’Rourke was tied with Mr. Cornyn after his surprisingly narrow loss to Senator Ted Cruz in November.

Internal polling by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee painted a less rosy picture, but Mr. Schumer went all out in pursuit of Mr. O’Rourke, even dispatching a close ally, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, to El Paso. Ms. Weingarten had a long conversation with Mr. O’Rourke and his wife about the seat, but the couple pretty much ruled out a Senate candidacy, according to people briefed on the exchange.

In North Carolina, Democratic leaders have thus far been unable to sell a Senate run to the state’s attorney general, Josh Stein, who is Mr. Schumer’s top pick to challenge the incumbent, Senator Thom Tillis, a freshman. Mr. Stein would have the fund-raising prowess to compete in a race where expenditures by the candidates are likely to exceed $100 million.

Mr. Hickenlooper, a former two-term Colorado governor with a centrist bent, would seem perfect to challenge Senator Cory Gardner, who might be the most endangered Republican up for re-election next year, in a state that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

John Hickenlooper, a former governor of Colorado, has already turned down repeated entreaties by Democratic Party leaders to consider a Senate bid.

But Mr. Hickenlooper, who is expected to announce his decision on a presidential run next week in Denver, has already turned down repeated entreaties by the Schumer and Cortez Masto team. They have enlisted Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, to keep pressuring Mr. Hickenlooper to lower his sights to a more realistic level.

Likewise, Mr. Tester and other high-profile Democrats of Montana, including Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, have been prodding Mr. Bullock to reconsider.

But the Senate is a tough sell for governors, who find it hard to go from running states to running legislative errands as freshmen, and it is an even tougher sell for Westerners who would have to endure long round-trip flights to Washington.

Operatives close to Mr. Schumer and Ms. Cortez Masto view Mr. Hickenlooper as a soft “no” — in part because of Mr. Gardner’s vulnerability. That is exceeded only by Senator Doug Jones, the Democrat who triumphed in a special election in Alabama only after his opponent, Roy S. Moore, was accused of sexually assaulting teenage girls, according to recent polling.

But Mr. Schumer has made it clear, through intermediaries, that Mr. Hickenlooper has less time to tarry than Mr. Bullock does. Two potentially well-funded candidates, Mike Johnston, a former state senator, and Andrew Romanoff, the former speaker of the Colorado House, have already entered the race, and others may soon follow.

Ms. Cortez Masto and Mr. Schumer have adopted a tag-team approach. Ms. Cortez Masto patiently hears out potential candidates’ complaints and concerns, while Mr. Schumer hammers away at the fundamental political reality — namely, that each recruit has a much better chance of being elected to the Senate than the presidency.

Mr. Schumer, forever tie-deep in party fund-raising, has become especially active this year. He has made it something of a personal project to persuade Ms. Abrams, who lost a bitter governor’s race last year, to challenge Senator David Perdue in his first re-election campaign. Mr. Schumer recruited Ms. Abrams to deliver a well-received rebuttal last month to Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address.

The event demonstrated Ms. Abrams’s ease in front of a national audience, but also her political savvy: Her team placed the audience a few feet farther away than at most similar speeches, so that potential critics could not focus on the facial expressions of the crowd behind her.

While Mr. Schumer’s appeals to Ms. Abrams have been more frequent, his partner’s one meeting with Ms. Abrams may have had a bigger effect.

Ms. Cortez Masto spoke passionately about what it was like to be the first Hispanic woman elected to the Senate, which made a big impression on Ms. Abrams, according to a person close to her.

Here’s how Andrew Cuomo ends our first interview at the beginning of January, sitting in a chair in his office, after eating cookie No. 4 from the tray his staff prepared. I put a simple question to him: “Would you like to be president?” He dodges it over and over by talking about how much he wants to do his job as governor well. Finally he says, Well, Joe Biden is running anyway.

A lot of people think Biden is going to run, I acknowledge, and the former vice president certainly seems to be moving in that direction. But Biden looked like he was about to run in 2015 too, only to end speculation at the last minute. So: What if he doesn’t?

“Call me back,” Cuomo says

Ok, thanks. Not a concern with his policies per se, more about his "likeability" (although I hate to use that term.)

I haven’t heard any negatives about Hickenlooper, but I guess that’s primarily because of the worst Hickenlooper problem: I’ve almost heard nothing about him.

Lack of name recognition is a killer, but I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say on the debate stage.

I’m happy about the wide mix of voices we’ll be hearing.

John Hickenlooper’s boots weren’t made for hiking.

Were they even boots? We couldn’t decide. They occupied some limbo between boots and shoes and were all wrong for the trek that our group of six was taking: seven hours, about 10 miles, over a 12,500-foot-high pass in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Just a few hours in, he briefly took them off. Dear God. Blisters, blood: Just looking at his feet hurt. But he waved away our concerns, did some crude bandaging, switched into a pair of ordinary sneakers that he happened to have in his backpack and insisted that we press on. He walked more slowly, sure. But he smiled to the end.

That episode, from August 2015, captured Hickenlooper at his best: upbeat, affable and allergic to drama. For November 2020, could that kind of disposition be the ticket?

So much analysis of the Democratic presidential hopefuls characterizes them in ideological terms: left versus center, idealism or pragmatism, the revolutionaries and the incrementalists. So much is about gender, race and age.

But we should also look at these candidates in terms of the fierceness of their rhetoric and the sharpness of their edges. Do we want a livid warrior or a happy one? Someone eager to name and shame enemies, the way Donald Trump does, or someone with a less Manichaean outlook? Someone poised to reciprocate Trump’s nastiness or someone incapable of it?

I’m not entirely sure which type is more likely to defeat him. But I know which gives us a better chance at healing America — if that’s even possible — and moving us past a juncture of crippling animosity. It’s the type that Hickenlooper represents and maybe even exemplifies.

He jumped into the race on Monday as a long shot with limited name recognition. But he has a biography and a résumé that warrant attention. He didn’t enter politics until his early 50s, after a hugely successful career in beer — in brew pubs, to be exact. And he talks, persuasively, about what a customer-service business like that taught him about courting people rather than confronting them, about pacifying instead of inflaming.

As the mayor of Denver from 2003 to 2011 and then the governor of Colorado from 2011 until the start of this year, when he left office because of term limits, he was known for swearing off negative political ads, for gravitating away from divisive issues and toward whatever common ground he could find, and for a style with substantial measures of goofiness and geekiness but barely a pinch of truculence. That said, he marshaled toughness and persistence — as he did on that hike — to build a light rail system in Denver, expand Medicaid in Colorado, enact gun control and tug the state from recession to boom times that were the envy of other governors.

He has detractors, who say that he can be more self-consumed and prickly in private than in public. And it’s unclear whether he can project the authority and sense of purpose on the national stage that are crucial for a successful presidential campaign and presidency. It’s unclear, too, whether a Democrat with a record as moderate as his has a chance in the party’s primaries.

I’ve known him since late 2010, when I traveled to Denver to do an in-depth profile of him for The Times Magazine. Afterward we became friendly, which isn’t surprising. In contrast to Trump’s demonization of the media as the “enemy of the people,” Hickenlooper usually takes the view that if he’s open to and trusting of journalists, he’ll be treated fairly more often than burned. There’s an endearing generosity of spirit in that.

Hickenlooper and his first wife, the journalist Helen Thorpe, divorced during his first term as governor, but did so with such grace and good will that she dedicated her 2014 book, “Soldier Girls,” to him. At her big Denver reading, he sat in the front row.

And I remember a dinner years later at the Denver home belonging to him and his second wife, Robin Pringle, when he happened to spike a fever shortly before we eight guests arrived. He nonetheless hung in there, bantering with us for hours as if nothing was wrong.

Optimism, warmth and joy matter. They propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. I think they’re even a small part of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez phenomenon — the part that leavens the stridency and purity tests. She has a wide, dazzling smile. In a video that went viral, she dances.

Some of the Democrats who are pursuing or seriously considering presidential bids are better at dancing, metaphorically speaking, than others. It doesn’t come easily to Bernie Sanders, which is why he added all that poignant family history to his big speech on Saturday, or to Elizabeth Warren, which is why she sipped a beer in an Instagram video that was part of her rollout. It’s effortless for Beto O’Rourke. It’s present in Cory Booker. It comes and goes with Kamala Harris, who’s still calibrating her temperature.

Hickenlooper sees a sunny approach — one that emphasizes aspirations over grievances — as the necessary balm for a grossly divided country and the most potent antidote to Trump. In a phone conversation on Tuesday morning, he said that when the president pursues “these relentless accusations against all manner of people, he’s not just attacking those individuals. He’s also attacking all the people who admire those individuals and feel those individuals represent them.”

“It’s early in the campaign, so it’s hard to assess whether it’s going to be something that I have to work around or something that really attracts people — the fact that I focus on trying to create a context that’s less adversarial,” he told me. “I’m not trying to prove why I’m right or the other side is wrong. I’m trying to really listen to people.”

I’ll dance to that, whether I have the right footwear or not.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has recruited at least three veteran House Republican staffers and consultants to join his presidential campaign-in-waiting, bringing on seasoned and well-connected GOP operatives who know their way around the very political apparatus helping to reelect President Trump in 2020.