On Monday night, Joe Biden announced (kind of) that he is planning (maybe) to run for president in 2020.
NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell and other reporters were with Biden as he left the Senate after presiding over the renaming of the administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative in honor of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer last year:
Biden: I love this place.
Reporter: Are you going to run again?
Biden: Yeah, I am. I am going to run again. In 2020.
Reporter: For what?
Biden: For president.
[Laughter]
Biden: And also—what the hell, man? Anyway.
O’Donnell: We’re going to run with that sir, you know. If you drop that.
Biden: That’s OK. That’s OK.
Video:
Minutes later, Biden was asked if he had been kidding about running. “I’m not committing not to running,” he said after a long pause. “I’m not committing to anything. I learned a long time ago fate has a strange way of intervening.”
If elected in 2020, Biden would be 78 at inauguration. Donald Trump, at 70, is already set to be the oldest president in American history.
Biden actively considered a run in this year’s campaign but started making arrangements too late to competitively fundraise and campaign in the early primary states. “Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination,” he said in a Rose Garden speech last October.
Biden later campaigned with Hillary Clinton with a focus on reaching the kind of white working class whose votes would contribute to Trump’s win on Election Day. In a July appearance on Hardball, Biden said that the Democratic Party had stopped connecting with blue-collar whites:
Scarborough: We all are asking about Donald Trump. You’re talking about a guy who’s connecting with those workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who’s connecting with those people in Youngstown, Ohio, who’s connecting with those white, working-class voters in a way that you have your entire career—and a way that Hillary Clinton is not. You can just look at the numbers right now. Why is that?
Biden: That’s why I’m going to be living in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan—
Scarborough: —over the next six months. But why is that?
Biden: I think it’s two reasons. One, I think the Democratic Party overall hasn’t spoken enough to those voters. They’ve done the right thing for the voters—haven’t spoken to them. …
Scarborough: Have Democrats stopped talking to white, working-class voters?
Biden: I think we have, in part. And the reason is we’ve been consumed with crisis after crisis after crisis. And so I go in my old neighborhoods, and they go, “Joe. Hey, Joe, over here. What about me?” And I say, “Well, look, all these things that are happening.”
Biden could well make inroads with those voters in 2020. If he runs. Which he might not. Or might? What the hell, man?
