NEW YORK — People around Joe Biden are increasingly convinced he’ll run for president — and Thursday, he took the next step forward, using his appearance at a union rally here to unveil what for all intents and purposes would be his 2016 stump speech.

In and around the vice president’s office, planning and outreach for the expected run is intensely underway, creating an energy that looks to those close to it like a campaign taking shape. They’re talking to donors, they’re connecting with old supporters, they’re starting to think about potential campaign staff hires, according to people familiar with the activity.


The vice president’s small staff has been struggling to keep up with the demands of the sudden attention on him, whether that’s planning events or staffing them, or dealing with the media frenzy that’s intensified every day for Biden since he started more actively exploring a run while on vacation in South Carolina last month.

Biden’s top advisers are also starting to tackle the reality that contributed to his 2008 run being such a flop: Biden’s four decades being the king of Delaware gave him relatable roots to talk up, but never required him to build much of a political network or get particularly good with donors (or get to know too many of them). They know that they’ll have to bring new people on board very quickly to rapidly change up their entire operation, with an emphasis on political experience more recent than the 1990s.

Still, Biden hasn’t made final a decision, and people familiar with his thinking say they wouldn’t be shocked if he lands on no. What he says in private is similar to what he says in public—things like, “I don’t know if I’ve got enough good days to outweigh the bad days.”

But the reasons to run appear to be piling up in his mind.

Despite the many doubts he expressed in his Thursday interview with Stephen Colbert, Biden made more people watching him closely believe that he’ll get himself to yes when he told the Late Show host, “You’ve got to get up. And I feel like I was letting down Beau, letting down my parents, letting down my family if I didn't just get up.”

The raw emotion and honesty he displayed throughout that appearance also got pro-Biden hearts racing. It’s exactly why they think he’d win if he got into the race.

The numbers are beginning to be hard for him not to put faith in: a Quinnipiac poll Thursday showing Sen. Bernie Sanders jumping into the lead in Iowa and a CNN poll on Thursday night showing Biden creeping up to 20 percent, though still in third place. Clinton has dropped more than 20 points since June in that same CNN poll, and Biden was the top pick among Democrats as their “second choice” to be the nominee.

He thinks Clinton hasn’t put together a coherent message, and that she’s proven so far in her campaign that she’s not able to be the unifying figure that he believes the country needs and that he could be, people who’ve spoken with him say.

Though Biden’s said generically positive things about Sanders several times in the past few weeks, he hasn’t mentioned Clinton’s name. Through the week and again on Thursday, Biden said he doesn’t think that anyone should run for president without a clear message and reason for being in the race.

He has his.

Wrapping together his own life story and his history of resilience, his record working alongside President Barack Obama, his foreign policy chops, an emotional defense of working Americans who’ve been failed by politicians and a thundering demand that the country start doing more for them, Biden stood under a “Fight for Fair Pay” banner Thursday afternoon and sounded out his argument for running for president.

He said the president of China once asked him over dinner while he was traveling there, “How would you define America?”

“You can define it in one word,” Biden said. “Possibilities.”

His connection to Obama is key. So is bringing it all back to the tragedies he has suffered and a life story that resonates.

“When I was a single parent for five years after my wife and daughter were killed, I had enormous help from my mother, my father and my sister,” Biden said, as he reminded the union crowd here of the new executive order requiring federal contractors to provide paid sick leave that Obama announced on Labor Day (Biden said he’d announced it too). “But you know what, it’s really hard when you don’t have time to take off when your child is sick, or your parents, and if you do, not in my case, but for the vast majority of people, you lose a paycheck.”

Officially, the event was a rally with some of the city’s most powerful unions to cheer on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as he announced a push for a $15 state minimum wage for fast-food workers, and everyone else. There to brandish his progressive credentials by trying to glom onto the announcement and the crowd, Biden mostly brushed past that he so far has only supported a $12 federal minimum wage. All the wages need to go up, he said.

The major intractable problem Biden said he and Obama know they still haven’t fixed is stagnant wages and wage inequality. And too many politicians, he said, don’t seem to care.

“It matters how you treat other people,” Biden said. “It’s really not that complicated.”

Over and over through the event, the labor crowd responded with the old union cry that became Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan: “Si se puede!” (Yes we can.)

“Too many Americans no longer think it’s going to be okay,” Biden finished with a shout. “We have one single, solitary focus: to continue this fight so that every parent can look their children in the eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s going to be OK.’”

Many of the people walking out said they felt like they heard a presidential candidate.

“There are certain people who have powerful voices. And I don’t think you can get more powerful than the vice president of the United States,” said New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat who’s backing the minimum-wage proposal and has already endorsed Clinton, reflecting on the speech. “Whatever we’ve been doing for the last 30 or 40 years hasn’t worked to lift people out of poverty … This is something everyone running for president should be discussing.”

In New York, said Cuomo—who was in full Biden lovefest mode for the afternoon—people just can’t help but move forward and make progress.

"We take one step, and then we take another step, and soon we're walking,” Cuomo said, “and soon we're running."

