On Election Night last week, Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, went out to dinner with his wife, Diane, near their apartment, in Boston’s Back Bay. They propped up their iPads on the table, trying to synchronize their schedules after a hectic couple of months. On weekdays, Patrick had been on the road for his job, as a managing director at Bain Capital, the investment firm founded by his predecessor as governor, Mitt Romney. On weekends, he had travelled to a dozen states, to campaign for Democratic candidates in the midterms, and, in the process, to generate the kind of good will and name recognition that could help him if he chooses to run for President in 2020. Diane, meanwhile, had been winding down her law practice, as a management-side labor lawyer at the major Boston firm Ropes & Gray, where she had recently given up her partnership after working there since 1995. Back at home, after dinner, Patrick took a quick look at the election results, and then turned in early, rising, as is his custom, at dawn, to take stock.

“Election Day was better than the day before,” he told me, after he had absorbed the results. Patrick has a high, rasping voice, and sounded upbeat, as he usually does. “Control of the House is now in responsible hands. And it’s historic, and good for America, that so many of them are diverse, and women, and servant leaders”—that is, military veterans who were seeking political office. On his travels this fall, Patrick had sought out candidates campaigning in districts “where Democrats had not been competitive in a long time and were running at the grassroots level,” he told me. He saw this as an electoral opportunity for his party and as a reflection of the values he’s tried to espouse in his political career, which has so far consisted only of his two successful races for governor. “I think there is real power when you show up, when you respect people enough to ask for their votes,” he said. Several of the congressional candidates, such as Joe Cunningham, in South Carolina, Lauren Underwood, in Illinois, and Colin Allred, in Texas, came through with upset victories.

“On the downside,” Patrick went on, “there was no political price paid for overt racist appeals, in Florida, in Georgia, to a certain extent in Texas.” Ron DeSantis, who won the governorship in Florida, had said on Fox News that the state should not “monkey this up” by electing Andrew Gillum, a black progressive; in both Florida and Georgia, voters received racist robocalls. “We are a great nation because we are good,” Patrick said. “We are a nation that, by design, is supposed to have a conscience. We can either embrace that or not, and that’s the right frame for the policy questions we face. There are many ways in which the other party chooses outcomes that are cruel and unfair. But we have to make choices that reflect goodness—but that doesn’t mean soft. It means firm, rule-of-law-based choices for opportunity and fair play.”

Patrick has no illusions about the difficulty he will have distinguishing himself from the crowd. As governor from 2007 to 2015, he was little known outside New England, and he hasn’t spoken much in public since. Compared with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, he is practically a nobody. He is African-American, but so are Senators Cory Booker, of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris, of California. In 2020, Steve Bullock, of Montana, John Hickenlooper, of Colorado, and Terry McAuliffe, of Virginia—all possible candidates—will, like Patrick, be former governors. Patrick is a businessman, but so are Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg L.P.), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), and Tom Steyer (venture capital in San Francisco). Even within his own state, he is one of five potential candidates, along with Warren, John Kerry, and Representatives Joe Kennedy III and Seth Moulton.

Still, Patrick would enter the race with one significant distinction: he is a kind of political heir to Barack Obama, and enjoys broad support from people close to the former President. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s former senior adviser and still a close friend, told me, “Deval would make an outstanding President. He’d make a terrific candidate.” She added, “President Obama and Deval are very much alike in terms of their core values, what drove them into public service, their willingness to lend a hand, the responsibility to give back. I think they share a basic philosophy about what it means to be a good citizen.” Obama and Patrick also have in common roots in Chicago, Ivy League educations, and complicated relationships with largely absent fathers (which both men have chronicled in memoirs that feature youthful pilgrimages to Africa). They espouse a politics of unapologetic idealism, with a largely moderate, center-left orientation. On the stump, both are part teacher and part preacher. “Deval is a very genuine person, a very empathetic person,” David Axelrod, who has been a strategist for Patrick as well as for Obama, told me. “He is a guy who makes people feel comfortable. He’s very principled, you can see that—just like Obama.”

The election last week punctuated a season of political and societal cataclysms—the Kavanaugh hearings; the pipe bombs sent to President Trump’s critics; the murder of eleven congregants in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Trump used his campaign appearances to inflame his supporters with lurid appeals to their fear of immigrants and other outsiders. The events gave Patrick and his potential Democratic rivals the chance, as they campaigned around the country, to demonstrate how they respond to the political frenzy of the Trump era. For his part, Patrick tried to turn down the heat. While enthusiastic for the Democratic candidates by his side, he kept his message positive, and warned against excessive negativity. In this, too, he was echoing the demeanor of No-Drama Obama, who showed little interest in channelling his supporters’ anger; hope, not hate, was his message. And yet, in the Trump era, for many Democrats thoughtful diffidence is out, and rage is in. Eric Holder, Obama’s former Attorney General and yet another possible Presidential candidate, responded to the fall’s events by amending Michelle Obama’s famous dictum of 2016. “When they go low,” Holder said, “we kick them.” Patrick, by contrast, went high.

In mid-September, I met Patrick in New Jersey, where he was campaigning for Josh Welle, a thirty-nine-year-old Navy veteran running a campaign to unseat the state’s longest-serving congressman, a Republican named Chris Smith. (Welle lost by twelve points.) That afternoon, Patrick and I sat down at a diner in Asbury Park. In Washington, Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, and Patrick explained his opposition to the nomination. “Some of it is very personal,” he said. In the confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh had been accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford when he was seventeen. In 1993, Patrick’s brother-in-law was convicted of raping Patrick’s sister, and Diane has talked openly about being a victim of domestic abuse during her first marriage. “I can confirm that the experience of not being believed or having the experience not taken as seriously or treated as seriously is extremely painful,” he said. He spoke with sorrow and emotional distance, and, notably, didn’t denounce Kavanaugh directly, or Trump for choosing him.