The 2020 presidential election remains two years away, but Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has already been fielding questions about whether he has decided to run or not. Many experts say it’s a foregone conclusion that he will, but those close to Sanders say he is still seriously weighing his options.
Publicly, Sanders has said he is still undecided, but in a recent interview with New York Magazine, he said he would run if he thought he was the best candidate to beat President Donald Trump.
“If there’s somebody else who appears who can, for whatever reason, do a better job than me, I’ll work my ass off to elect him or her,” Sanders said before adding, ”If it turns out that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run.”
The comment in New York Magazine, published last week, included a long list of reasons why Sanders thinks he would be a strong candidate and laid out how he has criss-crossed the country since Trump took office.
Last week, the senator also hinted that his decision to run would be based on if he could win.
In a recent interview on MSNBC, Sanders said he wanted to make sure he was the “strongest candidate who can defeat Donald Trump” before deciding if he would run again or not, but that it was still unclear to him if he was that candidate.
Shannon Jackson, a top Sanders aide, said he believes Sanders still has not made a final decision on whether to run or not, and that when the Vermont senator says that he is still deciding, the public should believe him.
“Everyone knows what Bernie is here for and when he says he has not made a decision yet, I believe him, and I respect him for being open to the people and not trying to mislead them,” Jackson said.
Attempts to reach Sanders for an interview were unsuccessful.
But Sanders has positioned himself well for a run, and has been busy since he ran unsuccessfully against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary election.
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Sanders has visited 34 states, including 22 that voted for Trump. This included visiting 13 states in the final weeks leading up to the midterm election.
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., Sanders’ Vermont colleague on Capitol Hill, said that Sanders is the clear front-runner and that he has used his time between the presidential campaigns to make sure “progressives are mobilized and engaged” for the 2020 election.
“He is in a solid spot to be the candidate against Donald Trump. Bernie has the capacity to have a level of trust with the working class and rural America that is going to be essential for us to defeat Donald Trump,” Welch said, “He has to weigh the decision, but Bernie is first among equals.”
In polls of Democratic voters looking at 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden has received strong support. Sanders has too, but a pack of other candidates are not far behind.
In a CNN poll published in October, Biden received the most support from Democratic voters with 33 percent. Only 13 percent of Democratic voters chose Sanders and the the rest of the top five was made up of Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Cory Booker, D-N.J.,. Harris received 9 percent while Warren had 8 percent and 5 percent supported Booker.
A recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll had more than a quarter of Democrats, 26 percent, supporting Biden as their top choice to be the party’s nominee. Sanders sat in second place, seven points behind Biden with 19 percent of Democrats polled.
Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas., fresh off a losing effort to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas., came in third among Democratic voters with 8 percent.
O’Rourke, who had previously stated he would not attempt a 2020 president run, backtracked last week, and said he would not make a final decision about running until he leaves Congress in January.
Following O’Rourke in the poll was Warren, Harris, and Booker. Warren received 5 percent, ahead of Harris at 4 percent and Booker’s 3 percent.
Terje Anderson, chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, said it is still too early to tell who will be the Democratic nominee, but that many people will be making their case over the next few months as to why they are the best candidate.
“I want to hear from them all. I want to give them all a chance to make their case to the voters and then to the activists, the party base, the donors, to everybody, and see where that lands,” Anderson said, “I think there are potentially some very promising people, including Bernie, but who knows.”
While Sanders seems well-placed to make a presidential run if he so chooses, some political experts think the crowded Democratic field — with younger progressive candidates — may mean Sanders will not be as successful as he was in 2016. Sanders turned 77 in September.
In 2016, Sanders ran as a clear alternative to the centrist candidates, Clinton and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.
Sanders had strong support among progressives in the Democratic party and a strong base made up mostly of young, enthusiastic supporters, according to John Hudak, a political expert at the Brookings Institute, a left-wing think tank.
In an interview, Hudak said that unlike in the 2016 Democratic primary, Sanders will face off against other viable “progressive candidates”—like Harris, Booker, and O’Rourke — who may divide the support Sanders had in 2016.
“When you are in a sea of very similar candidates, what you end up doing is splitting up that base,” Hudak said, “So maybe Sanders gets the most votes among progressives, but that may not be enough to overcome one or two candidates splitting up the establishment vote.”
Hudak also said the 2020 Democratic primary may compare well with the 2016 Republican primary in which there was a number of highly qualified candidates.
“We haven’t had a Democratic primary with a flood of candidates since 2004 and before that it was 1992,” Hudak said, “I think Democrats forget what that flood of candidates can to do split up the vote but they just have to look across the aisle to see what that can actually do.”
Hudak said a large field made it “hard to imagine a world where Sanders is the best positioned candidate to take on the president.”
Trump emerged from a crowded Republican field in 2016.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who has worked with Sanders on bills targeting the online retail giant Amazon and Walmart, said although running is a grueling process, Sanders “owes it to the progressive movement to run.”
“He shows the Democrats what they need to do,” Khanna said, “Sen. Sanders has been the most effective Democratic senator in the last Congress. He has mobilized workers and he is the sole reason Amazon raised it to $15 per hour. Let’s be very clear, Jeff Bezos only raised the minimum wage because of Sen. Sanders’ leadership.”
Sanders, and the Democratic Party, seem focused on the singular goal of making sure the best candidate to beat Trump is put forward with unified support.
“There’s an appetite to beat Trump and that appetite is huge and the question is who is the best person to do it. It has to be somebody who can resonate with Republican voters as well as the Democratic base,” Welch said.
Jackson, a Sanders’ advisor, echoed Welch’s sentiment, saying that Sanders’ “main goal is to beat Trump.”
“We are doing everything possible to do that,” Jackson said, “He has said multiple times that he will support whoever the nominee is.”
But while Sanders mulls his options about running or not, he has kept busy.
Last week, Sanders’ new book, “Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance” was released in bookstores nationwide, in which he does not discount a presidential run but says “the year 2020 remains a long way off.”
Last week, Sanders attended a three-day Sanders Institute summit, a progressive think tank launched in 2017 by Sanders’ wife, Jane, and run by her son, David Driscoll, in Burlington.
The gathering of progressive leaders from across the country included Sanders Institute fellows Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii., Our Revolution President Nina Turner, Princeton University professor Cornel West, environmentalist Bill McKibben, and the actor and activist Danny Glover.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also spoke at the institute event.
On Monday, Sanders and McKibben are hosting a discussion on climate change in Washington, D.C., that is being billed as a “national town hall” to save “our climate crisis.”
Khanna said Sanders’ leadership on climate change and issues that impact working Americans is what makes him the early front-runner and that the Vermont senator is also setting up legislation that can be passed as soon as a Democrat takes the White House.
“Sanders is head and shoulders ahead of everyone else in terms of leadership. He is putting forward progressive policy and has progressive legislation ready to go so when we have a Democratic president we can have a lot of things ready to be signed,” Khanna said, “After Trump, we will have the dawn of a progressive era.”
Reporter Xander Landen contributed to this report.
