Almost no one knows who he is, but there may be a spot for Jeff Merkley on the left flank of the 2020 Democratic primary—and he wouldn’t rule out running even if Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are running.

He’s already beaten Warren to Iowa, and he spent more time in Des Moines this month than Sanders has since last year’s caucuses.


A senator from Oregon for nearly nine years, Merkley is probably best known for being the only colleague of Sanders to endorse the Vermont senator last year. Most people could walk by him on the street, or even on the Senate subway, and not know who he is—a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week showed that 73 percent of Americans had never heard his name.

He has no campaign staff, and has raised no money. But he seems to be hoping that the credibility he has with progressive activists and the wild new world of lefty politics will change all that. So he’s starting early, even if the odds don’t look great right now.

He has a certain philosophy of life, Merkley said.

“If I believe that something matters, I’ll throw myself into it, and I’m OK losing. But when you throw yourself in with that attitude, and you’re all about teamwork, sometimes you win,” Merkley told me for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, recounting a career that’s already taken him through a surprise election as a state representative in Oregon to being picked as speaker of the Statehouse to beating a popular incumbent to get to the Senate in 2008. “I’m willing to take on battles that I feel are important.”

Of course, if he does run, first he’ll have to figure out how to become known as something more than that-guy-you’re-vaguely-aware-of-who-endorsed-Bernie. But he already has down the coyness of a politician who spends a weekend in Iowa and pretends he’s shocked to hear people thinking he has presidential ambitions.

“I knew it would create some rumors, and obviously I guess I was right,” Merkley says. When I noted that he was obviously fine with that, he shot back, “I was right about that.”

Merkley is 60, and people who've been talking to him say he knows that this might be a run now or don’t run at all moment in his career. He’s the right age and would be 72 by 2028, if another Democrat beats Donald Trump in 2020 and then has a lock on the nomination for 2024. His progressive politics seem like they’re having a moment. And he’s not immune to the sense going around many Democrats these days that if Trump can win, maybe anyone can, and there’s certainly no harm in trying.

Whether there’s actually an appetite for pulling the party further to the left is a different question. Forty-eight percent of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton want to see their next candidate be more liberal, according to new POLITICO/Morning Consult polling, while 20 percent of Democratic men and 13 percent of Democratic women think the party’s become too liberal (among all registered voters, that number is at 43 percent). The poll tracked support for individual issues Merkley supports, from health care changes to free college to universal basic income, all at under 40 percent.

Merkley could use some buzz outside the Beltway—though inside Washington, he is very much a player, having quietly brought together leading groups on the left for what’s become a regular series of pragmatic, action-focused meetings. Every other Thursday, around the table in his conference room (or sometimes over the phone), top staffers from leading progressive groups MoveOn.org, Ultraviolet, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Daily Kos, Credo and Indivisible join him to plot strategy and share information. If there is a nerve center of the vast left-wing conspiracy, this is it.

“Sen. Merkley is doing terrific work connecting the inside and outside fights in the Senate,” says Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn.org and one of the activists leading the fight against Obamacare repeal.

Merkley circulates invitations among senators. Among the regulars: Warren, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Minnesota’s Al Franken. A rotating cast of others, including New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris, have been known to stop by. Sanders is always invited, but he never comes, instead sending a staffer and people from his Our Revolution group. In recent months, a staffer from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has started joining. The meetings began as strategy sessions for how to push a presumed President Hillary Clinton to the left on Cabinet picks and abruptly transformed into a lefty war council, bringing together battered progressives and minority senators looking to amplify a voice that’s much further from power than they’d been prepared for. They feed one another's intel, run through tactics and coordinate plans to escalate fights. When an Obamacare repeal effort suddenly looked as if it was coming through the Senate at the beginning of the summer, senators there were the ones who tipped off the groups to rush them into mobilizing.

Click here to subscribe to the full episode, to hear what became of the wind turbine Jeff Merkley built in his backyard, how an offhand slight in the math-science center in high school got him started in his first race, and the experience of being watched by North Korean troops last month on his trip to the border.

“It’s a loose coalition—they don’t take instructions. But the more communication we have between us, the better,” says Schatz. “We all have good connectivity to the grass roots back home, but in terms of organizations that can mobilize, we weren’t doing enough to work together.”

Some who know Merkley suspect he regrets not running for president last year—he could have been the progressive magnet pulling Clinton to the left, but without doing the damage that Sanders did to her that she blames in part for her loss. Merkley denies that, says he’s proud of backing Sanders and thinks Clinton’s wrong to hold a grudge against him.

In fact, he insists, Clinton ought to thank Sanders for running. “There was a tremendous amount of grass-roots energy that came into the general on behalf of the Democratic side, from those who were coming out of the Sanders campaign,” he says.

Merkley also notes that Clinton never asked him for an endorsement—while Sanders himself didn't call until late in the process. But, he says, “I think I would have endorsed him if he hadn’t asked me.”

As for Trump, Merkley likes his position on trade, and that’s about it. He calls the president a “mystery,” because he ran as a populist but is governing more like a movement conservative. “It was a surprise that he was able to campaign on one vision, and implement a completely different vision. He attacked Hillary for being too close to Wall Street. Well, he wakes up every day seeing what he can do for Wall Street, how he can tear down consumer protections.” Merkley calls Trump “very scary,” blasting his positions on Dreamers, climate change and living “his whole life stepping on others. He was raised to step on others.”

On international affairs, Merkley calls Trump “completely unacceptable”—a conclusion reinforced by Merkley's trip to the North Korean border last month, arriving just after the president made his “fire and fury” threat. “That language reinforced the argument that Kim Jong Un is making to his own population, which is that the U.S. wants to destroy North Korea, that they have to put all their resources into the military side, that they have to have nuclear weapons in order to deter America from bombing them,” Merkley says. Meanwhile, Merkley passes up chances to take swipes at the prospective competition—he dismisses any grumbling about Warren’s vote to confirm Ben Carson as Housing and Urban Development secretary or that much of her background is focused on financial issues, and says that Sanders, who’ll be 79 in 2020, isn’t too old to make another run and shouldn’t be rushed to make a decision.

In fact, right after recording the podcast interview, he rushed downstairs in the Hart Senate Office Building to Sanders’ official rollout of his Medicare for All plan. Fitting to his role within the progressive coalition, Merkley spent much of his time locked in place, taller than the rest of the crowd, mostly unnoticed. When his turn came to speak, he roused the crowd in a brief call and answer about wanting better health care.

“I’m all in on this,” Merkley says, finishing up. “Thank you, Bernie Sanders!”

“He has the right values to be president of the United States, absolutely,” Jeff Weaver, who ran the Sanders 2016 campaign, says after the event. “It’s a difficult road, and every person who thinks about it, regardless of their politics, has to look at—can they win, do they want to do it.”

Asked whether there’s room in the 2020 race for both Sanders and Merkley, however, Weaver called the question ridiculously premature.