John Delaney's early, aggressive 2020 presidential bid is 'all in' on Iowa

John Delaney is looking to go from anonymous to inescapable to electable over the next two years in Iowa.

The Democratic congressman from Maryland declared his 2020 presidential candidacy earlier this year — never mind the 2018 midterm looming between now and then — and is now embarking on an early, aggressive run at Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. He wrapped up a four-day swing through the state Monday, with plans to return every two weeks for the foreseeable future.

He says he’ll hold 400 to 500 events in the state before January 2019 — the point at which the race for president is traditionally thought to begin.

“I’ve got the right experiences and I’ve got the right perspective on what we need to do at this moment in time,” Delaney told The Des Moines Register over a cold turkey sandwich after a campaign stop in Mason City on Monday. “In life, you’ve got to do the work you think you’re meant to do, and I just think at this moment in my life, at this age and based on the flexibility I have, this is the work for me to do. This is it. I’m all in.”

Delaney, 54, is serving his third term in Congress, representing Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs and the state’s western panhandle. Before coming to Congress, he was a financier who founded two companies lending money to businesses.

On the trail, he tells audiences he was the youngest CEO to head a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and is currently the only former CEO of a public company serving in Congress. (He doesn’t mention that his net worth in 2015 was estimated at $92 million, making him the third-richest member of Congress.)

Such an early blitz of first-in-the-nation Iowa makes sense for a candidate like Delaney, said Brad Anderson, a Des Moines political consultant with presidential campaign experience dating back to John Edwards' 2004 run.

“It is a new approach and a strategic one for someone in his shoes," Anderson said. "This race is going to be totally wide open, and right now, it’s safe to say very few people know who John Delaney is. If he can build up some name ID by the point where other candidates start getting into the race, he could be taken seriously.”

Beyond the early-and-often approach, Delaney is staking his candidacy on the idea that Democrats and Americans as a whole are hungry for a unifying force in politics and a commitment to broad-based, bipartisan solutions in Washington.

He believes, in short, that he can win by running to the middle, and by pulling the rest of the Democratic Party with him.

“Hyper-partisan politics is destroying our country,” Delaney says at almost every campaign stop. “It’s dividing communities; it’s even dividing families.”

As long as Donald Trump is president, Delaney argues, Republicans cannot claim to be the party of national unity. Given Democrats’ core belief in a positive role for government, they can.

“We ought to be the party that tries to restore some faith in government, and I actually think if we do that, we’ll restore the faith of the American people,” he said in Mason City. “This should be what the Democratic Party leads on because it’s not only the right answer for the common good of the country. Quite frankly, I believe it’s the right answer politically.”

Delaney says as president he would only pursue legislation in his first 100 days that could win wide bipartisan support. He points to a bill he’s sponsored in Congress that would raise $1 trillion in new tax revenues from overseas corporate profits and spend it on infrastructure improvements nationwide. The measure has more than 40 Democratic and 40 Republican cosponsors.

This approach presumes that Democrats — in Iowa and across the country — are interested in a candidate preaching unity, common ground and pragmatism in the age of Trump, and that they’ll vote for one in what is expected to be a crowded and boisterous primary campaign.

“We’re not going to win by just saying how bad (Trump) is or how bad the Republicans are,” he told a small group of Democrats in Hampton on Monday. “We have to have an alternative economic vision for the country that excites people, that talks about the future and talks about what they care about.”

Anderson, the political consultant, said Delaney may be on to something.

“It almost seems nostalgic to talk about doing what’s best for the country as opposed to what’s best for the party," he said. "The country could be in such rough shape, in terms of overall partisanship, by 2020 that maybe Democrats would look past a fire-breathing progressive for someone who can go in and get something done.”

Delaney says polling his campaign has conducted in Iowa and New Hampshire backs up that view. And it won some praise on the campaign trail.

"That is what we need — no more of this bickering and dividing and negativity," said Deborah Stock, a retired state worker from Bristow. “To heck with it. Let’s move on, let’s get this country back to being the great country that it is.”

But how will that argument resonate with the wing of the party that rallied behind U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 race, or with the new corps of activists drawn into politics explicitly in opposition to Trump?

In Mason City, 80-year-old party activist Chris Lauritsen demanded that Delaney commit to supporting a health care system in which all costs are paid by the government. Calls for “Medicare for all” approaches to health care have been rising on the Democratic left in recent months, and promise to be a major issue in the 2020 presidential race.

Sanders introduced Medicare for all legislation in September, drawing 15 co-sponsors including several Democratic senators who are thought to be weighing presidential bids.

“I have decided that any Democrat who will not commit to a single-payer health care system is not going to get my support,” Lauritsen told Delaney on Monday. “I want a commitment to a single-payer health care system.”

“So let’s talk about that,” Delaney replied. “This is going to take a little time, because health care is a conversation that should take a little time.”

Over the next seven minutes, Delaney outlined “concerns” he had with a single-payer approach, arguing that a purely public system couldn’t keep pace with costs, potentially leading to lower quality care and longer wait times for patients.

Instead, he said, Democrats should work to allow Americans over 55 to buy into the existing Medicare program — a step he said would address ongoing problems in the private insurance market and ensure wider access.

“There’s no question every single person in America should have health care…” Delaney said. “That should be the uncompromising value statement of the Democratic Party. But we should have a really important debate about how we get there.”

That nuanced answer didn’t satisfy Lauritsen.

“He committed to as little as he could possibly commit to,” Lauritsen said, adding, “I’m not pleased with that, and I won’t be supporting him. I mean, if he’s the nominee, I’ll support him, but when I go to the caucuses, he won’t be my choice.”

The events in Mason City and Hampton were two of 24 Iowa appearances across four days last weekend, ranging from a Democratic forum in Des Moines and a taping of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” to a party barbecue in Ames and a meet-and-greet in St. Ansgar.

He’ll be back Saturday for the Woodbury County Democrats’ Harry Hopkins dinner in Sioux City.

Delaney has already announced he won’t seek re-election to Congress in 2018, freeing him to devote the time necessary to introduce himself and make his case. He’ll certainly need the extra exposure.

Whatever his platform, Delaney is all but unknown nationally, and faces an unkind historical precedent: Members of the U.S. House rarely make it to the White House without holding another, higher office in between. The last guy to do it was Abraham Lincoln, in 1860.