Joe Biden has been saying yes to nearly all the political invitations coming his way, with new ones arriving almost daily. Privately, the former vice president and his staff have started talking about how to begin planning a strategy with a roughly 18-month timeline so that if he decides on another presidential run, he’ll be best positioned to get it off the ground.

Biden will be 77 by the time of the next Iowa caucuses, but Biden 2020 just might happen.


He will be in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Sunday night for a speech at the state Democratic Party dinner. After that, he’ll appear at a fundraiser for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and deliver, by turns, a speech to the Florida Democratic Party, an address to investment leaders’ SALT Conference in Las Vegas in May, and commencement addresses at Harvard University, Colby College and Morgan State University. It’s the kind of schedule that would fit with a candidate in the early stages of a White House run, but adviser say that at this point his activities are guided only by keeping his commitment to staying involved and helping rebuild the Democratic Party.

While former President Barack Obama is holding back to avoid being drawn in directly with his successor, Biden will be stating a case, and making sure people hear him state it. The former vice president, according to people who’ve spoken with him, is eager to be much more political, though not directly anti-Trump.

“He doesn’t sit still well,” said a Biden adviser. “He wants to have a voice. The more stuff he does like this, the more people hear his voice.”

People frequently approach Biden to say they wish he’d have run in 2016, that they think he would have won. Occasionally, he’ll get very critical of Hillary Clinton in private conversations, but to most people he just says, “Thank you.” And for the people who tell him they want to see him run against Trump, Biden keeps going back to the same line: “I’m not planning on it, but I’m not going to tell anyone I’m not doing it.”

Then again, he's also told some people, "If I'm walking, I'm running."

Within the world of former Obama aides, the affection for Biden runs deep. The same is true among many Obama donors and Democratic operatives. They differ on whether they want that to lead to a 2020 run, both because they worry about seeing him lose and because they worry about holding back a new generation of party leaders.

“In a lot of ways, Joe Biden is the answer and the antidote to everything that’s Donald Trump. You take a president who has more conflicts of interest than any president in the history of this country and compare him to a public servant who refused to own a share of stock, the contrast couldn’t be more stark,” said Andrew Weinstein, an Obama bundler and former Florida Democratic Party finance chair, who said he hasn’t been contacted, but sees a “compelling case” for a Biden run.

"I have heard nothing, I swear to God I've heard nothing,” said one top Obama fundraiser who is close to Biden and would be open to seeing him jump in. “It's not real until they start calling the major bundlers. Right now, they're just going around having fun being in demand."

Biden spent his first few months out of office getting his centers up and running at the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on his cancer moonshot initiative, spending time at his grandchildren’s soccer and lacrosse games. He’s written a little of the book that he’s signed to do, though he keeps agreeing to more events for time that’s supposed to be blocked out for him to work on it.

People who’ve been in conversation with Biden say he’s been waiting to let loose to push his vision of attention to the middle class — a mission that isn’t, in his mind, in conflict with paying attention to civil rights. In what’s become a new priority for him since the election, he’ll be spending much of his time urging young people disappointed with Trump’s win not to become disaffected and unplug from politics.

“The core commitment from my perspective in building a great country is the opportunity for people to get to the middle class and stay in the middle class,” Biden said Friday, at the inaugural event of the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware. “We have to return to this sense of anything is possible, anything is possible in America. In order to do that, we have to rebuild this consensus that there used to be a basic bargain in America.”

Later, he ticked off statistics about how opioid use and divorce have spiked among men ages 40 to 55 who’ve lost their jobs, and how life expectancy among that group has declined.

“All these things matter not only to how we govern ourselves, but how we view ourselves,” Biden said, and “how we become one America again.”

That’s a long way from interviewing campaign managers or scouting office space. When told by a reporter sitting in his West Wing office the week before Trump’s inauguration that his talk about why he’s a Democrat — the party’s core value, in his view, is believing everyone should be treated with dignity, the vehicle for the expansion of rights in modern politics — sounds like a stump speech, he brushed it off.

“Well, but it's the essence and the truth of the Democratic Party,” he said.

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In his previous president flirtations and formal runs — 1984, 1988, 2004, 2008 and 2016 — Biden has never been known for extensive advance planning, and he continues to tell aides that he’s unlikely to pull the trigger this time, though ... maybe.

The brain trust around him remains the same: his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, close aide and friend former Sen. Ted Kaufman, consultant Mike Donilon and former chief of staff Steve Ricchetti. That’s been augmented, as the discussions about his plans continue, with three younger aides working for him at the end of his term who’ve stayed in the orbit even as they’ve taken other jobs: Kate Bedingfield, his former communications director, and top political aides Greg Schultz and Michael Schrum.

Already, the potential of what Biden’s doing has caught the attention of Republicans thinking about what a Trump reelection run might look like, and looking at the former vice president's message — from the economy to the focus on infrastructure — they feel some skittishness about what to say about him.

But for now, Republicans are feeling encouraged by the sheer number of Democrats being talked about as 2020 candidates, and the destructive melee of a primary that could create.

"First he'd have to get through Mark Cuban," said Jason Miller, Trump's 2016 communications director.

Among early state players, there’s definite interest in seeing where all of this leads to.

“If he takes another run, I’m with him,” said Jim Lykam, an Iowa state senator who’s been a Biden supporter for years and eagerly awaited the 2016 run that never came. Lykam said he continues to have conversations with other politicians in the state wondering what would have happened if the former vice president had run.

“I’ve been encouraging him every time I see him,” said South Carolina state Rep. James Smith, who was one of the people talking to him frequently in the final deliberations before Biden pulled the plug on his 2016 near-campaign, and who recently updated the South Carolinians for Biden website for 2020.

“Joe Biden is as much about the future of our party and our nation because of who he is and what he stood for,” said Smith, who’s weighing his own run for governor of the Palmetto State in 2018. “He is what people want to see, somebody who’s authentic, who’s real, who really understands working families.”

“He has certainly earned the respect and consideration of folks, and he has a network of folks that have been with him for decades. He would start off with a reservoir of goodwill if he chooses to run,” said New Hampshire Democratic chair Ray Buckley, who invited Biden to Sunday’s dinner — an event that, when Biden skipped it in 2015, was read as an indicator that he wasn’t going to run in 2016.

Many Democrats find they can’t believe they’re having serious thoughts about another Biden run. But, they point out, Trump in the Oval Office has rewritten their sense of what’s supposed to work in politics.

“Joe Biden,” Lykam said, “there’s no one like him.”

Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.