Alexander Burns

The shift in attitude has come in fits and starts over the past few weeks, seemingly more as an organic turn in the political season than as a product of coordinated action by party leaders. But each assertive act has seemed to build on the one before, starting with a debate-stage clash last month over “Medicare for All” and culminating in recent days with the entry of two new moderate candidates into the primary, Michael R. Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, and a gentle warning from former President Barack Obama that Democrats should not overestimate voters’ appetite for drastic change.

Most convincing to some Democrats may be the off-year elections this month in Kentucky and Louisiana, where moderate-to-conservative Democrats prevailed in governors’ races that President Donald Trump worked strenuously to win for his party. The victories bolstered the argument, advanced by some leading Democrats, that the party could peel away some of Trump’s supporters in 2020 by avoiding “litmus test” battles and courting the political middle.

“Clearly, factually, people who voted for Trump voted for our Democratic gubernatorial candidates,” said Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, a moderate who leads the Democratic Governors Association. She said Democrats could win those voters in 2020 with a “message of unity” and pragmatic promises on issues like health care and student debt.

For months the Democratic race was defined in terms of which candidate could promise the most daring policy reforms — a contest in which Biden, the former vice president, was struggling to keep pace with Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. As the most liberal candidates set the agenda, many in the party establishment squirmed, anxious about alienating moderate voters.

Now the primary has become an increasingly jumbled contest, shaped by Democrats’ competing appetites for visionary ideas, tactical realism and sheer political novelty. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, appears to be harnessing those tensions to his advantage, at least in Iowa, where for the first time he emerged as a clear front-runner in a CNN/Des Moines Register poll this weekend.

In Nevada, where more than a dozen candidates were gathered for the state party’s “First in the West” dinner, Rep. Dina Titus was holding up the Democrats’ off-year victories as a reason for optimism heading into 2020. But Titus, who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race, urged the presidential field to be mindful of the “moderate Democrats in suburban districts” who flipped control of the House last year.

“We have just got to make sure that we appeal across the board,” said Titus, who introduced both Biden and Sanders at events this weekend. “We are a big-tent party.”

That proved to be true this month, at least in Louisiana and Kentucky. The Democratic victors in both states, Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana and Andy Beshear, the governor-elect of Kentucky, ran on expanding health care coverage at the state level and largely avoided national issues, like impeachment. Edwards in particular positioned himself well to the right of the national Democratic Party, opposing abortion rights and new efforts to regulate firearms.

No Democratic leaders believe either state will be in play at the presidential level in 2020, and few would argue that the party should shift as far to the right as Edwards in order to compete.

But Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a leading supporter of Biden, said Sunday that Democrats should take the election in his state as a sign that “the country is not as far to the left as people would have us believe.”

“If you look at Kentucky, if you look at Louisiana, it shows 2020 could be a very good year for Democrats,” Richmond said, “but we have to read the tea leaves right, learn the real lesson of what these races are saying.”

Democratic voters still appear determined to find a Goldilocks-like option in the race — a candidate who both generates excitement and soothes concern about the general election, someone who promises sweeping change but appears capable of winning Republican votes. Warren climbed in the polls for months on the strength of her reform message and a mastery of policy that conveyed reassuring competence, but her poll numbers have slipped recently amid intensive scrutiny of her health care plans.

Warren has attempted to allay voters’ reservations on that front in recent weeks by pledging not to raise middle-class taxes to pay for her plans. She also described how she would prioritize improvements to the Affordable Care Act, including the creation of an optional government health-insurance plan, before attempting to create a single-payer system.

Both Warren and Sanders remain among the best-positioned candidates in the primary election, with distinctive appeal to young people and other voters seeking a large-scale redraw of the political system — an overlapping agenda that drew roars of approval at the “First in the West” dinner.

At the dinner, both expressed disdain for incremental politics, with Sanders saying that “tinkering around the edges just won’t do what needs to be done” and Warren dismissing more modest policies as “a nibble here and a nibble there.” Both are polling at or near the top of the pack in three of the four early primary states, including Nevada.

And both are actively working to persuade voters that their approach is the better bet in a general election, including by appealing to voters who feel alienated from the political system.

“If the best that Democrats can offer is business as usual after Donald Trump, then Democrats will lose,” Warren said at a campaign stop here Sunday afternoon. “We win when we have solutions for the problems in people’s lives.”

Andrea Griffin, an elementary school nurse in Las Vegas, said she had been wary of Warren as a general-election candidate but came away feeling more confident after watching her Sunday.

“I was a little skeptical about a plan for everything, but she has a pretty good grasp on what the major issues are and I kind of think that she might be able to get it done,” said Griffin, 56, a former independent voter who said she registered as a Democrat two weeks ago.

Griffin said she was also curious about Buttigieg, but had essentially ruled out Biden, explaining, “I think America is not ready to go back to business as usual.”

While he is consistently leading national polls, Biden’s vulnerability in the primary appears to come, at least in part, from his seeming inability to inspire Democratic voters. He is seen as a sensible and safe option, and a conventionally steady hand for the presidency.

At the Nevada Democrats’ dinner Sunday evening, Biden urged primary voters to think cautiously: “We’d better be real careful about who we nominate,” he warned, “because the risk of nominating someone who wouldn’t beat Trump is a nation and a world that our children and our grandkids won’t want to live in.”

For a good number of primary voters, that appeal is persuasive enough: At Biden’s town hall-style event in Las Vegas the night before, Phyllis Lind, a retired health care worker who is becoming a substitute teacher, explained her thinking about the race in terms that conveyed her party’s conflicting impulses. She said she was drawn to Warren because she was “for the common person,” and to Buttigieg because he had personal charisma “like Obama.” But at the moment, Lind, 73, said she was firmly supporting Biden.

“We need to have candidate that is going to also get the moderate Republicans,” Lind said.

At the moment, Buttigieg seems to be claiming an inchoate space that lies between Sanders’ ideological movement and Biden’s unapologetically tactical approach to the election. But Buttigieg’s rise in the polls has been chiefly confined to the earliest primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has not generated interest among African-American and Latino voters, cornerstones of the Democratic coalition.

At the dinner in Nevada, Buttigieg repeatedly struck the theme of unity, pledging to “bring together an American majority” for Democratic policies.

His prepared remarks also included a rebuke seemingly aimed at Warren: the text circulated to reporters had Buttigieg saying that no one should be “written out of a particular political party” because of a policy disagreement — an apparent allusion to Warren’s recent barb suggesting Biden might be running in the wrong party’s primary because of his attacks on the idea of single-payer health care.

But Buttigieg did not deliver the line, instead saying he wanted support from people “whether you are a progressive or a moderate or what I like to call a future former Republican.”

Mayor John Cranley of Cincinnati, a moderate Democrat who supports Buttigieg, said he saw the shift toward Buttigieg as a function of voters’ intense concern about defeating Trump.

“I think that it’s clear Democrats are focused on winning,” Cranley said.

Pointing to neighboring Kentucky, the northern bulge of which houses the suburban bedroom communities of his own city, Cranley argued that Beshear’s victory with right-leaning voters there could be a case study for the national party.

To win there, Cranley said, “You can’t have somebody who is to the far left on some of these issues.”

This article originally appeared in

How Moderates Are Seizing the Moment in the Democratic Primary

LAS VEGAS — After spending months in anxious passivity, staking their hopes on Joe Biden and little else, moderate Democrats appear suddenly determined to fight for control of their party in the 2020 elections.

“Clearly, factually, people who voted for Trump voted for our Democratic gubernatorial candidates,” said Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, a moderate who chairs the Democratic Governors Association. She said Democrats could win those voters in 2020 with a “message of unity” and pragmatic promises on issues like health care and student debt.

In Nevada, where more than a dozen candidates were gathered for the state party’s “First in the West” dinner, Rep. Dina Titus was holding up the Democrats’ off-year victories as a reason for optimism heading into 2020. But Titus, who has not endorsed a candidate in the presidential race, echoed Obama in sounding a note of caution, urging the presidential field to be mindful of the “moderate Democrats in suburban districts” who flipped control of the House last year.

“If you look at Kentucky, if you look at Louisiana, it shows 2020 could be a very good year for Democrats,” Richmond said, “but we have to read the tea leaves right, learn the real lesson of what these races are saying.” Polls show the party’s voters are conflicted about their priorities for 2020, determined to beat Trump but torn between a desire for systemic change and a yearning for a calmer political climate in Washington.

Both Warren and Sanders remain among the best-positioned candidates in the primary election, with distinctive appeal to young people and other voters seeking a large-scale redraw of the political system. They are campaigning on promises not just to improve but to completely overhaul major sectors of the economy, including health care, financial services and student lending. Both are polling at or near the top of the pack in three of the four early primary states.

And both are actively working to persuade voters that their approach is the better bet in a general election, including by appealing to voters who feel alienated from the political system. At a campaign stop here Sunday afternoon, Warren offered a forceful electability argument of her own, calling on Democrats to run a campaign of big ideas rather than “a few proposals that have been carefully crafted not to offend big donors.”

“If the best that Democrats can offer is business as usual after Donald Trump, then Democrats will lose,” Warren said. “We win when we have solutions for the problems in people’s lives.”

While he is consistently leading national polls, Biden’s vulnerability in the primary appears to come, at least in part, from his seeming inability to inspire Democratic voters. He is seen as a sensible and safe option, and a conventionally steady hand for the presidency — and for many primary voters that is enough.

At Biden’s town hall-style event in Las Vegas on Saturday evening, in an elementary school gymnasium, Phyllis Lind, a retired health care worker who is becoming a substitute teacher, explained her thinking about the race in terms that conveyed her party’s conflicting impulses. She said she was drawn to Warren because she was “for the common person,” and to Buttigieg because he had personal charisma “like Obama.” But at the moment, Lind, 73, said she was firmly supporting Biden.

“We need to have candidate that is going to also get the moderate Republicans,” Lind said. “We need to look at having a candidate right now that’s going to have a wider base.”

At the moment, Buttigieg seems to be claiming an inchoate space that lies between Sanders’ ideological movement and Biden’s unapologetically tactical approach to the election. But Buttigieg’s rise in the polls has been chiefly confined to the earliest primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has not yet shown any capacity to generate interest among African-American and Latino voters, cornerstones of the Democratic coalition.

“I think that it’s clear Democrats are focused on winning,” Cranley said, arguing that victory in 2020 would not come from “having policies that are to the left of the American people” but rather from “speaking to the values of Middle America that I think the country believes are not represented” by Trump.

Moderates Are Stepping Up to Seize the Day in the Democratic Primary

Bloomberg arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, with a few aides, according to two people familiar with his activities. Arkansas is the second state in which he will be on the Democratic primary ballot, after qualifying to put his name on the ballot in Alabama last Friday. The two southern states both have early filing deadlines, even though they are not among the first primaries on the calendar.

“Mike wanted to go and do the filing himself,” said Jason Schechter, a spokesman for Bloomberg. “If he runs, he’s going to go to states that Democrats never go to in the primary campaign. We’re starting that today in Arkansas.”

Bloomberg planned to have lunch at Sims BBQ with the mayor of Little Rock, Frank Scott Jr., during a brief visit to the city.

Bloomberg is considering a trip to North Carolina as soon as this week, two people briefed on his plans said. The state’s filing deadline is not imminent, but similar to Arkansas it is among the Super Tuesday contests in early March that Bloomberg would aim to contest aggressively as a candidate.

Michael John Gray, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, said he had spoken briefly with Bloomberg in Little Rock on Tuesday morning. He said Bloomberg had recalled visiting the city during his time as mayor, for the opening of Bill Clinton’s presidential library. Gray said there was “a lot of buzz” in the state capital about Bloomberg’s visit, since Arkansas has only attracted visits from a few candidates so far in this campaign.

“I thanked him for being there in Arkansas,” Gray said, suggesting Bloomberg could generate interest among voters beyond the traditional early-state circuit. “You do that by showing up in places where people don’t show up.”

On Tuesday afternoon, in his first Twitter post related to a potential candidacy, Bloomberg trumpeted his trip to Arkansas.

In a further sign that Bloomberg is likely to run, one of his longtime lieutenants informed the Pete Buttigieg campaign that he could no longer back the South Bend, Indiana, mayor in a primary that included Bloomberg.

Bradley Tusk, Bloomberg’s former campaign manager in New York, hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg last month. But on Tuesday, Tusk said that while he still saw Buttigieg as an impressive candidate, circumstances had changed and he would be supporting Bloomberg in the presidential race.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire media executive, is expected to make a final decision within days on whether to proceed with a presidential campaign. People close to him believe his mind is all but made up and his advisers have been recruiting potential campaign staff at a furious pace since the end of last week.

But Bloomberg has not yet made any formal announcement and there is at least a chance he could back away from the campaign.

Bloomberg is one of several prominent Democrats weighing a late entry into the 2020 campaign. Most serious besides Bloomberg is former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who could jump into the race as soon as this week.

Patrick and his allies have been reaching out to Democrats in the early primary and caucus states, and Patrick spoke last week with former Vice President Joe Biden to tell him he was considering the race.

The former governor initially rejected making a White House bid last year, in part because his wife had received a cancer diagnosis, but she has been given a clean bill of health, according to Massachusetts Democrats.

Moreover, Patrick believes nobody in the race has shown the promise of being able to both unify the party and heal a deeply divided country after the election. Democrats who have spoken to him say he envisions a campaign similar to that of his longtime friend, former President Barack Obama, which would focus more on bringing people together than making a particular ideological case.

One adviser to Patrick noted that, when he first ran for governor in 2006, his signature vow was that he’d be “governor of the whole state” and that he’d make a similar pledge to a fractured country.

It is a reflection of the unsettled nature of the Democratic race that both men may join the primary fray so late. But Patrick and Bloomberg would likely approach the campaign very differently, starting with their activities this week.

If Patrick runs, he is likely to file to become a candidate in New Hampshire before the deadline for entry there on Friday. Bloomberg, however, has indicated he would skip all four of the early primary and caucus states in a presidential campaign, focusing instead on the Super Tuesday primaries in March, and he may not even take the step of putting his name on the ballot in New Hampshire.

Bloomberg Heads to Arkansas to File for 2020 Presidential Primary

Michael Bloomberg flew to Arkansas on Tuesday morning to personally file paperwork to become a presidential candidate in the state’s Democratic primary, sending a highly public signal about his strong interest in entering the 2020 race.

Advisers to Bloomberg said that he had not made a final decision about whether to run for president, and that he planned to enter the Alabama primary as a preliminary step because the state has a filing deadline of Friday for candidates seeking to appear on the ballot next year.

Bloomberg, 77, has told associates that he intends to run, and if he backed away from the race now it would represent an abrupt reversal that would recall his past flirtations with a presidential bid. His advisers are preparing to meet several other upcoming filing deadlines, including in Arkansas and New Hampshire, where candidates must submit paperwork next week.

His consideration of a 2020 bid reflects the fluidity of a Democratic with no dominant front-runner, and a broader anxiety within the Democratic Party’s donor class and centrist establishment about whether the current leaders in the primary are capable of defeating Trump.

Party officials and donors have been talking privately for weeks about whether the one-time front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, will have the money to finance a multistate primary and whether Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are too liberal to win the general election.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who is one of the country’s richest men, has his own vulnerabilities, such as his support for stop-and-frisk policing and charter schools, and his criticism of Warren in particular over her positions on progressive taxation and trillions of dollars in new spending, which are popular on the left. But advisers to Bloomberg say he is also concerned that Biden may not be strong enough to win the nomination and that Warren or Sanders would be defeated next November.

Bloomberg has seriously explored running for president at least three times — in 2008 and 2016 as an independent, and earlier this year as a Democrat — but in every case he has opted against mounting a campaign. He has never before taken the step of actually filing paperwork to designate himself a candidate.

He initially decided last winter that he would not challenge Trump in 2020, in large part because he concluded he could not win the Democratic nomination with Biden in the race, as a formidable standard-bearer for the party’s moderate wing. But Biden’s struggles in recent months have given Bloomberg new optimism that there is space for him in the campaign.

There is considerable skepticism among the leading Democratic candidates about Bloomberg’s path forward in a 2020 primary. A centrist business mogul in his eighth decade, he would be seeking to lead a party focused on questions of economic inequality, cultural diversity and generational change. (The 2020 field already has several candidates in their 70s: Sanders is 78, Biden is 76, Trump is 73 and Warren is 70.)

The news of his revived interest in the race drew scorn from several leading Democrats, including Warren and Sanders, who branded him a billionaire seeking to buy the presidency to protect his own interests.

A political nomad with respect to party affiliation, Bloomberg was elected mayor three times on the Republican ticket before he registered as a Democrat during the midterm elections and spent more than $100 million to help the party take control of the House of Representatives.

He holds liberal views on a range of important issues — including gun control, climate change, immigration and abortion rights — but he is more conservative on issues related to the economy and law enforcement, and his record in government and business is ripe for intensive scrutiny.

Bloomberg to File Paperwork for 2020 Presidential Primary

Michael Bloomberg will file paperwork Friday afternoon to place himself on the Democratic presidential primary ballot in Alabama, advisers said, a first step toward competing for the party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump next year.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire businessman, has been privately weighing a bid for the White House for weeks and has not yet made a final decision on whether to run, an adviser said. But in the first sign that he is seriously moving toward a campaign, Bloomberg has dispatched staffers to Alabama to gather signatures to qualify for the primary there. Although Alabama does not hold an early primary, it has a Friday deadline for candidates to formally enter the race.

Bloomberg and his advertisers called a number of prominent Democrats on Thursday to tell them he was seriously considering the race, including former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the retired majority leader who remains a dominant power broker in the early caucus state. Aides to Bloomberg also reached out to Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

Reid said in a brief interview that Bloomberg had not explicitly said he was running for president but that the implication of the call had been clear. “It wasn’t just to wish me a good weekend,” Reid said.

Bloomberg has prepared to enter presidential races before, in 2016 and then earlier this year, only to pull back in the end. In those flirtations with the presidency, Bloomberg has never taken the step of filing to put his name on a state ballot.

Should Bloomberg proceed with a campaign, it could cause a seismic disruption in the Democratic race. With his immense personal wealth, centrist views and close ties to the political establishment, he would present an instantaneous threat to former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been struggling to raise money and assemble an ideologically moderate coalition.

Bloomberg, 77, initially bowed out of the 2020 race because of Biden’s apparent strength, but he has since grown skeptical that Biden is on track to win the Democratic nomination, and he does not see the two leading liberals in the race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as strong candidates for the general election.

But Bloomberg would face a difficult path in a Democratic primary largely defined so far by debates about economic inequality. His presence in the race would offer fodder to the party’s rising populist wing, led by Warren and Sanders, who contend that the extremely rich already wield far too much influence in politics. He is a former Republican who registered as a Democrat before the midterm elections last year. And his mayoral record, including his support for stop-and-frisk policing and his championing of charter schools, has the potential to alienate pillars of the Democratic Party’s political base.

Warren, who has sparred from afar with Bloomberg over her proposals to tax the extremely rich, needled him in a tweet Thursday by pointing out an online calculator showing how much billionaires would pay under her tax proposals. She called his potential candidacy “another example of the wealthy wanting our government and economy to only work for themselves,” while her campaign sent out a blistering fundraising email accusing Bloomberg of trying to “buy the presidency.”

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, signaled the stiff resistance Bloomberg would face if he joined the race. “More billionaires seeking more political power surely isn’t the change America needs,” Shakir said in an email.

Howard Wolfson, a close adviser to Bloomberg, said Thursday that the former mayor has grown uneasy about the existing trajectory of the Democratic primary. He said Bloomberg viewed President Donald Trump as an “unprecedented threat to our nation” and noted the Democrat’s heavy spending in the 2018 midterm elections and this week’s off-year races in Virginia.

“We now need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated — but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that,” Wolfson said. “If Mike runs, he would offer a new choice to Democrats built on a unique record running America’s biggest city, building a business from scratch and taking on some of America’s toughest challenges as a high-impact philanthropist.”

Advisers to Bloomberg said he would likely make up his mind about the race within days, rather than weeks.

He will have to move quickly if he is to compete in a serious way for the Democratic nomination. Beyond Alabama, several other states have filing deadlines in quick succession, including Arkansas and New Hampshire, with its crucial early primary.

Bloomberg petitioners were on the campus of the University of Alabama on Thursday, a Democratic strategist said, and officials with the Arkansas Democratic Party said they had been contacted by a Washington, D.C., law firm Thursday to seek detailed information about the state’s filing procedures. The firm had not named Bloomberg as its client, stirring speculation in the state party that the surprise candidate might be Hillary Clinton.

Michael John Gray, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, said Bloomberg’s financial might would make him an important wild card in the race.

“It shakes things up, obviously,” Gray said of a potential Bloomberg campaign.

A Fox News poll found in late October that Bloomberg would face more opposition than enthusiasm at the outset of a primary campaign: Presented with Bloomberg as a hypothetical entrant into the primary, 6% of Democratic primary voters said they would definitely support him, while 32% said they would never vote for him.

While some of Bloomberg’s longtime advisers have committed to a campaign, including pollster Doug Schoen and ad-maker Bill Knapp, he would have to build a campaign from zero in the early-primary and caucus states, and he may have a hard time qualifying for either of the two remaining debates this year.

In a Democratic race, Bloomberg would face a battery of complicated questions about his political ideology and governing record. He has been a vigorous advocate for core liberal causes, like gun control and battling climate change. But as mayor, Bloomberg also championed police searches that targeted black and Latino men; in an interview last fall, he defended his administration’s stop-and-frisk policing strategy.

In the same interview, Bloomberg also expressed skepticism about the #MeToo movement in general, as well as the specific allegations of sexual misconduct against Charlie Rose, the disgraced anchor who for many years broadcast his show from the offices of Bloomberg’s media company.

Mayor Steve Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina, said in an interview that he spoke with Bloomberg in late October, and the two discussed the unfolding presidential race. Benjamin, a Democrat who has not taken sides in the primary, predicted Bloomberg’s background as a businessman and mayor, and his stances on climate and guns, would make him a formidable contender if he runs.

“There’s a lot of work to be done in gearing up for the first four primaries and caucuses, and certainly for Super Tuesday, but I would caution anybody not to underestimate Mike Bloomberg,” Benjamin said.

Raimondo, the Rhode Island governor, stopped short of backing Bloomberg as a presidential candidate but issued a glowing statement about his record.

“While this is not an endorsement, Michael Bloomberg is a friend, and I admire his track record as a successful business leader and mayor who finds practical solutions to some of America’s biggest challenges, from creating good jobs to addressing the opioid crisis and fighting for common-sense gun safety,” Raimondo said.

But several likely Iowa caucusgoers, in interviews Thursday night at an event for another candidate — Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. — expressed a lack of enthusiasm for a potential Bloomberg candidacy.

“This is a rigorous thing, to run for political office,” said Janny Miller, 65, of Des Moines, Iowa. “For somebody to step in late — while he probably has a lot to offer — maybe it’s not the right thing to do.”

Even if Bloomberg enters the race almost immediately, it would likely be impossible for him to qualify for the next debate Nov. 20. The deadline is just six days away, and he would need 165,000 unique donors and four polls showing him at 3% or higher (or two early-state polls at 5%). There may not even be four qualifying polls released in the next six days, and those that will be released may already be underway without Bloomberg’s name.

For the December debate, he would need 200,000 unique donors and four polls showing him at 4% or higher, or two early-state polls at 6%. The deadline for meeting that threshold is Dec. 12.

Although Bloomberg could still opt against running, even his preliminary steps toward a campaign may come as a blow to Biden, who has been counting on strong support from centrist Democrats, traditional party donors and much of the business community to carry him forward in the race.

When Bloomberg previously announced in March that he would not run for president, advisers indicated the decision was shaped in part by Biden’s strong popularity with Democratic primary voters. But Biden’s position in the race is evidently no longer imposing enough to keep Bloomberg at bay.

As of late afternoon Thursday, Bloomberg had not spoken with Biden about his updated plans, an adviser to Bloomberg said.

Aides to Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bloomberg Bid for 2020 Rises on the Horizon

Michael Bloomberg is actively preparing to enter the Democratic presidential primary and is expected to file paperwork this week designating himself as a candidate in at least one state with an early filing deadline, people briefed on Bloomberg’s plans said.

Bloomberg called a number of prominent Democrats on Thursday to tell them he was seriously considering the race, including former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the retired majority leader who remains a dominant power broker in the early caucus state.

Reid said in a brief interview that Bloomberg had not explicitly said he was running for president but that the implication of the call had been clear.

Should Bloomberg proceed with a campaign, it could represent a seismic disruption in the Democratic race. With his immense personal wealth, centrist views and close ties to the political establishment, he would present a grave and instantaneous threat to former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been struggling to raise money and assemble an ideologically moderate coalition.

But Bloomberg, 77, would likely face a difficult path in a Democratic primary largely defined so far by debates about economic inequality. His presence in the race would offer fodder to the party’s rising populist wing, led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who contend that the extremely rich already wield far too much influence in politics. And his mayoral record, including his support for stop-and-frisk policing and his championing of charter schools, has the potential to alienate pillars of the Democratic Party’s political base.

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, signaled the stiff resistance Bloomberg would face if he joined the race.

“More billionaires seeking more political power surely isn’t the change America needs,” Shakir said in an email.

Howard Wolfson, a close adviser to Bloomberg, said Thursday that the former mayor viewed President Donald Trump as an “unprecedented threat to our nation” and noted Bloomberg’s heavy spending in the 2018 midterm elections and this week’s off-year races in Virginia. Bloomberg, he said, has grown uneasy about the existing trajectory of the Democratic primary.

He will have to move quickly if he is to compete in a serious way for the Democratic nomination. Beyond Alabama, several other states have filing deadlines in quick succession, including Arkansas and New Hampshire, with its crucial early primary. While he has maintained a cluster of high-powered advisers in New York, he would have to build a campaign from zero in the early primary and caucus states, and it may be difficult for him to qualify for the two remaining debates this year.

A former Republican who repeatedly explored running for president as an independent, Bloomberg registered as a Democrat ahead of the midterm elections last year. In his past flirtations with the presidency, Bloomberg has never before taken the step of filing to put his name on a state ballot.

“I believe Mayor Bloomberg would be an incredibly strong candidate,” Benjamin said. “There’s a lot of work to be done in gearing up for the first four primaries and caucuses, and certainly for Super Tuesday, but I would caution anybody not to underestimate Mike Bloomberg.”

Michael Bloomberg Actively Prepares to Enter 2020 Presidential Race

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire businessman, has been privately weighing a bid for the White House for weeks and has not yet made a final decision on whether to run, an adviser said. But in the first sign that he is seriously moving toward a campaign, Bloomberg has dispatched staffers to Alabama to gather signatures to qualify for the primary there. Though Alabama does not hold an early primary, it has a Friday deadline for candidates to formally enter the race.

Should Bloomberg proceed with a campaign, it could represent a seismic disruption in the Democratic race. With his immense personal wealth, centrist views and close ties to the political establishment, he would present a grave and instantaneous threat to former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been struggling to raise money and assemble a ideologically moderate coalition.

But Bloomberg could also reshape the race in other ways, intensifying the Democrats’ existing debates about economic inequality and corporate power, and offering fodder to the party’s rising populist wing, led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who contend that the extremely rich already wield far too much influence in politics. Bloomberg has repeatedly expressed discomfort with certain policies favored by both Warren and Sanders.

Howard Wolfson, a close adviser to Bloomberg, said Thursday that the former mayor viewed President Donald Trump as an “unprecedented threat to our nation,” and noted Bloomberg’s heavy spending in the 2018 midterm elections and this week’s off-year races in Virginia. Bloomberg, he said, has grown uneasy about the existing trajectory of the Democratic primary.

Bloomberg will have to move quickly if he is to compete in a serious way for the Democratic nomination. Beyond Alabama, several other states have filing deadlines in quick succession, including New Hampshire, with its crucial early primary. While he has maintained a cluster of high-powered advisers in New York, he would have to build a campaign from zero in the early primary and caucus states, and it may be difficult for him to qualify for the two remaining debates this year.

In a Democratic race, Bloomberg would face a battery of complicated questions about his political ideology and governing record. He has been a vigorous advocate for core liberal causes, like gun control and battling climate change. But as mayor, Bloomberg also championed police searches that targeted black and Latino men; in an interview last fall, he defended his administration’s stop-and-frisk policing strategy and also expressed skepticism about the #MeToo movement.

Though Bloomberg could still opt against running, even his preliminary steps toward a campaign may come as a blow to Biden, who has been counting on strong support from centrist Democrats, traditional party donors and much of the business community to carry him forward in the race.

Michael Bloomberg Is Expected to File for the Alabama 2020 Presidential Primary

Michael R. Bloomberg is actively preparing to enter the Democratic presidential primary and is expected to file paperwork this week designating himself as a candidate in at least one state with an early filing deadline, people briefed on Bloomberg’s plans said.

At The New York Times DealBook conference in New York, Clinton said she saw two of the biggest policies embraced by the left in the 2020 Democratic primary — “Medicare for All”-style health care and a tax on the assets of the very wealthy — as unworkable or politically impractical.

A longtime leader of her party’s moderate wing, Clinton was most blunt about Warren’s proposal to replace private health insurance with a single-payer system funded largely by taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Asked if she thought that proposal could get passed into law, Clinton answered in the negative.

“No, I don’t — I don’t,” she said. “But the goal is the right goal.”

Clinton did not criticize either Warren or Sen. Bernie Sanders, the liberal populist who challenged Clinton in the 2016 primary and who also supports Medicare for All, in harsh or personal terms. But she suggested that the approach to health care favored by both was misguided, saying that “the smarter approach is to build on what we have” by adding the option of a public health care plan to the offerings of the Affordable Care Act.

It is not a surprising preference for Clinton: In the 2016 campaign, she supported introducing a public health insurance option but consistently rejected Sanders’ calls for single-payer health care.

Her comments suggest she remains skeptical of the populist forces on the rise in Democratic politics. While Clinton did not endorse a candidate, she indicated a clear preference in one of the largest debates raging in the Democratic Party: whether to nominate a candidate who would make sweeping changes to the country’s government and economy, or someone who would restore something like normalcy in Washington.

“I would like us to return to a presidency where we don’t have to wake up every day worried,” Clinton said, adding, “I’d like us to get back to sort of boring, normal times.”

She also said she believed she knew who the Democratic nominee was “likely to be,” but declined to name that person.

Clinton, who has not entirely ruled out another run for the presidency but has taken no apparent steps toward a campaign, also sounded a note of skepticism about the detail-rich policy debates that have helped shape the Democratic primary so far. Those disputes during primary season, she said, do not always translate into actual governance after the election.

Her 2008 primary battle with Barack Obama furnished an instructive case study, Clinton said: During that campaign, Obama fiercely opposed her proposal for a government mandate that all individuals purchase health insurance, but he went on to include that very rule as president.

The clash over health care unfolding in the primary now, she said, represented “a very healthy debate.”

Of a tax on wealth, which is favored by both Warren and Sanders, Clinton questioned whether it could really function as its proponents intend. She said she would support other methods of taxing the rich, like raising income-tax rates, imposing stiffer estate taxes and eliminating certain provisions of the tax code that favor the financial sector.

“I think there are other ways to raise the revenues, and ways that do get those who are well-off to pay more, because I do think we’ve got to have that as part of our effort to combat inequality,” Clinton said.

In theory, Clinton herself could be subject to the wealth taxes proposed by Warren, who has called for a levy on fortunes over $50 million, and Sanders, who would impose a similar tax on fortunes greater than $32 million. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have earned well over $100 million through paid speaking and book deals since the turn of the century.

Hillary Clinton on Medicare for All: 'The Goal Is the Right Goal,' but It Won't Pass

Hillary Clinton said Wednesday she hoped for a return to “boring, normal times” after the 2020 election, voicing skepticism of her party’s populist wing and predicting that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for single-payer health care would never get enacted.

O’Rourke made the decision to quit the race in the middle of this week, on the eve of a gathering Friday of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, according to people familiar with his thinking. He is not expected to run for any other office in 2020, despite persistent efforts by party leaders and political donors to coax him into another bid for the Senate.

His campaign has been under extreme financial strain, and O’Rourke’s advisers concluded that proceeding in the race might have meant making deep cuts to his staff in order to pay for advertising and other measures to compete in the early primary and caucus state.

O’Rourke confirmed his withdrawal in a post on Medium and in email message to his supporters. In that message, O’Rourke said he was proud of championing issues like guns and climate change but conceded that his campaign lacked “the means to move forward successfully.”

“My service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee,” he said.

By leaving the race, O’Rourke completes the winding path from his early status as a potential front-runner to his drastic decision over the summer to reframe his candidacy as an activist crusader after the mass shooting targeting Latinos in his home city of El Paso, Texas.

Since then, O’Rourke has campaigned doggedly on issues related to guns and race, calling most notably for federal gun-control policies that would require owners of assault-style weapons to surrender them to the government. That’s a far more aggressive stance than most Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed.

That last phase of his campaign has taken O’Rourke far beyond the early-state circuit and included visits with prison inmates in California and an immigrant community in Mississippi. In an August interview after the El Paso massacre, O’Rourke said his focus would be “taking the fight to Donald Trump” and “being with those who have been denigrated and demeaned.”

In recent weeks, he has also criticized other Democrats in newly strident terms, declaring in September that Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and the Senate minority leader, had accomplished “absolutely nothing” on gun control. Schumer, an architect of gun control legislation in the 1990s, said he saw no support in the party for O’Rourke’s stance on requiring gun owners to surrender certain firearms.

At a rally in Des Moines on Friday evening, O’Rourke told supporters he made his decision “so recently and so reluctantly.”

“We have to clearly see at this point that we do not now have the means” to continue, he said, adding: “Though this is the end of this campaign, we are right in the middle of this fight.”

In a hallway outside the venue of an Iowa Democrats dinner, where O’Rourke had been scheduled to appear, a black-draped table for his campaign was abandoned Friday night.

Passersby helped themselves from the roll of “Beto” stickers sitting on the table, near a cardboard box full of one-sheet guides to “our most common cheers.”

“So sad!” a woman exclaimed as she walked by. “It’s so sad.”

O’Rourke entered the 2020 primary in the middle of March with the aura of a celebrity, cheered by rank-and-file Democrats and admired by no less a figure than former President Barack Obama for his near miss challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz in the nation’s largest red state. He effectively unveiled his run for the White House in a cover story for Vanity Fair in which he declared he was “just born to be in it.” He later described the cover, along with his choice of words, as a mistake.

In the earliest days of his campaign, O’Rourke was a fundraising powerhouse, collecting more than $6 million in his first day as a candidate. But his fundraising cratered almost immediately. He raised more in his first 48 hours than in the following 100 days and steadily depleted his campaign treasury by spending more than he was taking in.

And despite the near-heroic status he achieved in the eyes of Democratic voters as a daring challenger to a Republican they loathed — Cruz — O’Rourke found it far more difficult to stand out from a crop of presidential candidates that included other young orators, like Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and determined progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

O’Rourke also came under harsh attack in a June debate from Julián Castro, the former housing secretary and a fellow Texan, who blasted O’Rourke from the left on immigration. O’Rourke, who was not an especially strong debater in his Senate campaign, appeared badly caught off guard.

To O’Rourke and his allies, it has been evident for some time that he was confronting a vanishingly slim path forward. At the last Democratic debate, a pair of O’Rourke’s donors flew to Ohio to meet with him about his campaign and the possibility of him quitting the race to run for Senate in Texas against John Cornyn, who is up for reelection. O’Rourke told them he was not running for Senate, according to people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman to O’Rourke reiterated that stance Friday. “Beto will not be a candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas in 2020,” said Rob Friedlander, an aide to O’Rourke.

It is unclear whether O’Rourke’s exit will have a significant effect on the larger shape of the Democratic primary race. In a New York Times/Siena College poll released Friday, O’Rourke was supported by just 1% of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa. He had not yet met the thresholds for participating in the upcoming primary debates in November and December.

O’Rourke may find — as other former candidates have done — that the goodwill of his fellow Democrats returns quickly once he is no longer a competitor for the nomination. He is 47 years old, leaving him plenty of time to consider a return to electoral politics. But in a recent interview with Politico, O’Rourke said that if he did not prevail in the 2020 presidential primary he would not become a candidate again.

“I cannot fathom a scenario where I would run for public office again if I’m not the nominee,” O’Rourke said last month.

Short of Funding, O'Rourke Drops Out of the Race

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas announced that he is dropping out of the presidential race, ending a campaign in which he struggled for months to recapture the energy of his insurgent 2018 Senate candidacy on a national stage full of other big personalities and liberal champions.

Several slow-building trends have converged to upend the race over the last few weeks: Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s steady ascent in the polls has accelerated. Both she and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a fellow progressive, have raised immense sums of money from small donors online, dominating the Democratic field and each collecting about $10 million more than Biden in the last quarter. And Biden’s numbers have gradually slipped in a way that has alarmed his supporters.

The race is far from over: All three of the top candidates — Warren, Biden and Sanders — have a path to victory, and there is still time for longer-shot candidates to make a real run at the nomination. The CNN/New York Times debate in Ohio on Tuesday is likely to test Warren’s status as an emerging front-runner, subjecting her to new criticism from her fellow Democrats on matters ranging from health care policy to trade and the role of the government in overseeing the economy. Above all, she may need to allay lingering reservations about her appeal to swing voters in the general election.

And Biden signaled Thursday night that he will come into the debate fighting. “One of the problems I’m finding, I’ve got to be more aggressive,” he said at a fundraiser in Los Angeles. He then used a roundabout example to explain that debate time restraints do not allow time for lengthy answers.

“When someone says, you know, you know, ‘Are you still beating your wife?’ And, and I go, ‘I have a long explanation,’ and they say, ‘You got 30 seconds to answer.’ And you say, ‘No. And then, wait a minute, what’d I just say? No, I’m not still beating my wife.’ But so, I’ve had, I’ve had some difficulties,” he said.

If Tuesday’s debate could break in any number of directions, what may be resolved is the overall mood of Democratic primary voters and whether they are more inclined to seek a politically cautious nominee who promises to restore normalcy in Washington or a more confrontational standard-bearer with an ambitious and disruptive reform agenda. It is candidates in the latter category who now control the bulk of the financial might in the race and are best positioned in most of the early primary states.

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who is not aligned in the primary, said an “anti-establishment” current had plainly taken hold, with voters rewarding candidates for defying the conventional limits of political debate and “pushing boundaries in really productive ways.” She pointed not only to Warren and Sanders but also to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who has embraced a new political identity for himself as a gun-control activist and a critic of his own party’s relatively cautious platform on the issue.

“Across the board, whether it’s Beto talking about assault weapons or Warren and Sanders talking about Wall Street,” Greenberg said, “it does feel like there is a shift in the party that is kind of new.”

Greenberg said there was still space for Biden to run a strong campaign because of the way voters perceive his values and character. Americans, she said, believe Biden “cares about people and working-class people, regular people, and that’s not an insignificant asset.”

Yet it has been Warren, rather than Biden, who has consistently gained strength. Campaigning on a message of purging corruption in Washington and restructuring the economy, Warren has closed Biden’s lead in the polls every week since the beginning of the summer and is now in a position to upset him in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote.

Biden remains a strong contender for the nomination, largely because of the support he collects from African American voters. But he has struggled for months to articulate a clear vision for the future and has relied heavily on Democratic nostalgia for the Obama administration. In recent weeks, he has been consumed in a grisly political clash with President Donald Trump.

So far, the support Biden has lost does not seem to have gone to another moderate, like Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. Only Warren has been moving up in the national polls, suggesting either that Biden’s lost supporters have defected to her camp or that they have become undecided altogether.

If Warren has become the leading liberal standard-bearer, Sanders has been a steady third in national polls, and his fundraising power is likely to keep him among the most formidable competitors in the race. Yet his campaign has been grappling with the implications of Sanders’ heart attack in Las Vegas last week, a medical emergency that landed him in the hospital and has kept him off the trail for days.

He has sent mixed signals about his path forward, first indicating that he would scale back his campaign schedule and then defiantly reversing that suggestion.

It is unclear whether Sanders’ physical condition will affect his poll numbers: He has a solid base of support nationally, and few other candidates believe his core followers will be easily dislodged. There is at least a new degree of uncertainty about whether he will be in a strong position to vie for liberal Democrats who have already been migrating toward Warren.

Nearly all of the candidates feel pressure to do something in the Ohio debate to stop the race from becoming a contest entirely defined by a Warren-Biden rivalry, either by inflicting direct damage on Warren’s campaign or by outflanking her as an alternative to Biden. The ongoing impeachment inquiry targeting Trump has only added to the pressure on the Democratic field, since the tumult in Washington is likely to leave voters with even less time to devote to reviewing underdog options.

Buttigieg in particular has been moving assertively in recent weeks to position himself as a center-left alternative to both Biden and Warren, using his considerable war chest to run television ads in Iowa.

Several other candidates of different ideological stripes are counting on Iowa for a breakthrough, including Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar. A wild-card joining them onstage will be a new contender, Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund investor who has spent lavishly from his personal fortune to brand himself as a reform-minded outsider.

For Warren, meanwhile, the debate may help reveal whether she can consolidate her gains across the Democratic Party.

On Wednesday, she campaigned in South Carolina, where she has so far struggled to gain traction with the African American voters who largely decide the primary there. To cement her status as a front-runner, she may have to win over a range of constituencies torn between their interest in her ideas and a more cautious political calculus that draws them to Biden.

One of those voters is Ohio’s former governor, Ted Strickland, the only Democrat to hold that office this century. Like many Democratic voters, Strickland, a populist with close ties to organized labor, said he saw Biden as the safer bet for the general election but found it hard to resist the appeal of Warren’s proposals, most of all her plan for a new tax on vast private fortunes.

“I think there may be something to the electability issue for Mr. Biden, in Ohio,” Strickland said. “But if I could just choose to put someone in the presidency — if that was my choice alone — it would be hard for me to pass up Elizabeth Warren.”

Strickland said he had spoken with Biden recently and saw him as a seasoned diplomat and a reliable “economic progressive.” But Warren, he said, was gradually easing voters’ reservations about her ability to go up against Trump by talking about policy issues “in ways that are easily understood.”

Biden remains a clear favorite in just one of the early states, South Carolina, and his advisers have predicted that he would fare better in larger, more diverse states that vote later in the calendar. He is counting, in particular, on older and more moderate African American voters to hold back the party from stampeding toward a more ideological liberal candidate. In 2016, black and Latino voters helped Hillary Clinton withstand a persistent primary challenge from Sanders.

Yet scattered polling in the later states has largely followed the national trend: Last week, for instance, the Public Policy Institute of California released a poll finding a statistical three-way tie in the nation’s most populous state between Biden, Warren and Sanders.

Mark Baldassare, president of the institute, said there was no indication in his poll that the state’s diversity would represent a stumbling block for candidates on the left, as Biden is hoping. The primary debates would be crucial to determining Warren’s continued momentum, he said, because voters seemed to be using them for insight into the general election.

“It has become kind of a proxy for: How are these candidates going to do when they stand up next to Trump?” Baldassare said. “I think this will be Elizabeth Warren’s moment now because if she is in the mix for front-runner, people are going to be testing her and seeing: How does she do? How does she do when she has to be on defense?”

With a crucial debate looming next week in the Democratic presidential primary, the party’s populist wing appears increasingly in control of the race — rising in the polls, stocked with cash and with only a wounded leading candidate, Joe Biden, standing in its way.

Alexander Burns

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