Welcome to 2020 Vision, the new Yahoo News column covering the presidential race. Reminder: There are 348 days until the Iowa caucuses, and 619 days until the 2020 presidential election.

It was a big week for Bernie Sanders. The Vermont independent senator formally launched his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign on Monday. On Tuesday, the Sanders campaign said it raised nearly $6 million in its first 24 hours, or roughly four times as much as Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., raised in the first 24 hours of her campaign’s much-heralded launch.

The same day, the Daily Beast reported that Sanders had hired Faiz Shakir, national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, to serve as his campaign manager. “Shakir, 39, is almost certainly the first campaign manager of a major presidential campaign who identifies as a Muslim,” the Daily Beast noted.

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s 2016 campaign manager and longtime friend, had been eyeing a different role for Sanders’s second run and will likely serve as a senior adviser.

Then on Thursday, Sanders announced his campaign’s four national co-chairs, who together with Shakir fill out a diversity full house: former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz and Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen.

“To win this election and build a movement to defeat Donald Trump, we must bring together a team prepared to fight for economic, social, racial and environmental justice,” Sanders said. “And that’s exactly what Nina, Ro, Carmen and Ben have been doing their entire lives.”

But Sanders wasn’t the only 2020 candidate to make staffing moves this week. Harris named three women of color to her presidential campaign: Emmy Ruiz, who served as Barack Obama’s Nevada state director in 2012 and Hillary Clinton’s state director in Nevada and Colorado in 2016, to be a senior adviser; Missayr Boker, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s director in 2018; and Julie Chávez Rodriguez, granddaughter of civil rights leader Cesar Chávez. The women will serve as Harris’s national political co-directors.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign named its communications team, tapping veteran GOP operative Tim Murtaugh as communications director; Mark Lotter, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, as director of strategic communications; and Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany as national press secretary.

McEnany’s first task? Issuing the Trump campaign’s official response to Bernie Sanders joining the 2020 field.

Our statement on Bernie Sanders and the socialist agenda of the 2020 Democrat contenders: pic.twitter.com/YAmzQNJrUJ — Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) February 19, 2019





“Crazy Bernie has just entered the race. I wish him well!”

— President Trump

“What’s crazy is that we have a president who is a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe and a fraud. We are going to bring people together and not only defeat Trump but transform the economic and political life of this country.”

— Bernie Sanders

Related: What Trump and Sanders have said about each other

View photos President Trump at a rally in El Paso, Texas, Feb. 11, 2019. (Photo: Eric Gay/AP) More

Trump’s ‘robust’ primary challenge

President Trump may be happy to handicap the 2020 Democratic presidential field, but there’s been a lot of talk in recent days of a possible Republican primary challenge — the first serious one to a sitting president since Ted Kennedy tried to wrest the Democratic nomination from President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Yahoo News’ Alex Nazaryan that he believes Trump will face a “robust challenge” for the GOP nomination. And that, Steele said, is as it should be.