John Delaney thinks the Democrats who intend to run for president in 2020 should stop lying about what they’re doing and announce already.

After all, he has. And the little-known Maryland congressman thinks that’s part of what will transform a presidential run that pretty much no one takes seriously into the next Jimmy Carter-style, out-of-nowhere explosion onto the presidential debate stage.


Delaney, who made his fortune founding two commercial lending companies, has already spent $1 million out of his own pocket, using it for TV ads in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids and a campaign office in Iowa. Since last summer, he’s taken 11 trips to the caucus state, plus eight to New Hampshire. He’s even written a new campaign book.

What does he have to show for it? While he’s been all but ignored in the national media, Delaney has an internal poll from Iowa that ranks him fifth in terms of name ID among potential Democratic candidates. Fifty-two percent of those likely 2020 Democratic caucusgoers polled know who Delaney is, which puts him behind only Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker—and ahead of buzzed-about figures like Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Terry McAuliffe.

Delaney believes that voters are already tired of the game of footsie others on that list are playing about whether they’re running or not.

“When I first went to Iowa the first time, last August, so many people came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for being honest about what you’re doing, and your ambition,’” Delaney told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

One conversation on the trail has stuck with him: a person who said to him, “All these people come to Iowa and New Hampshire, and we know they’re thinking about running for president or they’re planning on running for president, and we ask them that question directly, and they lie to us. And so our first introduction to them is based on a dishonest moment.”

Presidential candidates have already been trickling in, but Iowans are looking forward to the flood more than usual these days, said Andy McGuire, a former state Democratic Party chair who says she’s heard an eagerness from voters all over the state as she’s been campaigning for governor ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

“They want them to come now. They want to get rid of the people we have nationally now,” McGuire said.

On the trail, Delaney is reluctant to dive into his own life story—the kid from working-class origins who went to college on a union scholarship, started a business, grew it into a major success, and became the youngest CEO of any company traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead, his whole pitch centers around a wonky, policy-minded bipartisan unity in the face of national crisis—“the cost of doing nothing is not nothing,” he writes in his book, The Right Answer, its title drawn from a John F. Kennedy quote about looking for that instead of the Republican or Democratic answer.

Delaney spent five frustratingly plodding years since arriving in Congress building support for a bill that would reclaim corporate overseas taxes and invest it in infrastructure. He went to colleagues one by one with data presentations, got thanked for reaching out even by the people who said no, and added co-sponsors in pairs until 40 Republicans and 40 Democrats signed on.

Then the December tax bill reclaimed that tax money, but used it to finance deeper corporate cuts instead of investing in the kind of infrastructure initiatives Delaney proposed and which President Donald Trump keeps saying he wants. Delaney’s proposal didn’t even end up being a factor. He’s apoplectic.

Click here to subscribe and listen to the full podcast, and hear what Delaney says he learned from the story of his one-armed immigrant grandfather, and the kind of poker game he imagines debating Donald Trump would be like.

“The American people have correctly diagnosed that we have a problem, but the remedy they’ve chosen—Donald Trump—is completely incapable of fixing it,” he writes in his book.

That, says Delaney, is because there’s a real difference between being a politician with actual business experience and being Trump.

“He’s not really a business leader. He’s a business promoter. Those are very different things. I mean, business leaders, they pay their bills, they hire the best and the brightest, they think about their communities, they think about multiple stakeholders. You know, they believe life is long and that you build relationships. And most importantly, they’re focused on the future,” Delaney said. “Trump is kind of an anomaly because he doesn’t really do any of those things. He never pays his bills, he doesn’t hire the best people, he hires people who tell him what he wants to hear. He defaults on everyone he does business with. And he’s just maniacally focused on turning the clock back on everything.”

Delaney has the confidence of a self-made multimillionaire, who launched two companies into the stratosphere on a hunch and a lot of work, and then who turned around and ran against the machine to win a House seat drawn specifically to elect a Democrat (Maryland’s gerrymandering is currently part of a case before the Supreme Court).

In Delaney’s telling, he’s the tortoise who’ll soon get a jetpack.

“The fact that I’m not particularly well-known nationally is not really all that relevant, because when I do well in some—not only in the early caucuses and primary—but when I do well in a poll next year in Iowa and New Hampshire, that’ll all change overnight,” Delaney said.

The poll boosting Delaney’s confidence was of 503 likely 2020 Iowa caucusgoers, conducted for him by Harrison Hickman at the end of February.

“The people above him have been national personalities for a number of years. The fact that in a very short period of time he’s moved up to a tier of people who get mentioned [in the national media] as running for president is pretty amazing,” Hickman said.

Hickman, who was the pollster on John Edwards’ 2004 presidential campaigns, pointed out that this far ahead of the 2004 Iowa caucuses, the then-North Carolina senator had lower name ID than Delaney does right now—and finished second.

But, Hickman cautioned, “Name recognition is not voting.”

Delaney isn’t concerned. He’s spent $1.7 million of the $2 million he loaned his presidential campaign, and collected another $160,000 in donations. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates his net worth at $230 million, and he says he and his wife are ready to put in significantly more. There’s an operating budget, he said, but as of now, no spending cap, while other candidates continue to get more attention and raise much more money without declaring.

“By the time everyone gets into this race,” Delaney said, “I will have pretty much told everyone what I believe about pretty much every issue, and I’m not wavering from it a minute.”