As he fixes his sights on Iowa, the mayor says he will deliver a New York City-centric message. | AP Photo/Kathy Willens De Blasio heads to Iowa in hopes of defining a national role

Bill de Blasio is headed to Iowa again, but the mayor of New York City insists he’s really not running for president.

De Blasio, whose unfulfilled national ambitions have never been far from the surface, will be in Des Moines in early December preaching the progressive message as the best means for Democrats to win control of statehouses nationwide and, the biggest prize, the U.S. House of Representatives. He will also be trying to define a new role for himself in the party.


More to the point, he’s diverging from the Clinton brand of Democratic politics from whence he came and fully embracing the Sen. Bernie Sanders wing of the party — a seemingly more natural fit for a man who won his first mayoral term on the message of income inequality.

"I think the Democratic party is ill-defined right now, and I think it’s ill-defined because it’s lost touch with what should be its core ideology,” de Blasio said during a Gracie Mansion interview Sunday afternoon. “Because it’s ill-defined, they’re not winning elections, and the two go together.”

De Blasio's past Iowa trips have, thus far, produced subpar results — reflective of his struggle to command a more national audience. His delayed endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016 left him isolated, irking the Clintons and siding him against the left wing of the party, where he said his own ideology is a more natural fit. He was relegated to knocking on doors for the Clinton camp. A progressive forum he hoped to host there never materialized.

This time, with a term under his belt having run New York City, he plans to fully embrace the type of doctrine he said Democrats should have welcomed last year. He sees himself now as someone uniquely suited to carry that banner.

“I have been very open about the fact that I wish the national party had actually run on that platform,” de Blasio said. “If the party does not bring the progressive wing in more fully, then it’s at the party’s peril. I think there was a huge mistake made in 2016 to not invite in the Bernie Sanders movement more effectively.”

De Blasio will travel to Iowa to headline the Progress Iowa annual holiday party — the group’s largest event of the year and its most important outlet for fundraising. Progress Iowa is a self-described issue-focused organization that seeks to rally voters around progressive candidates and issues with the hopes of helping more progressives hold elected office in that state.

The group is akin to New York’s Working Families Party but does not endorse candidates or hold a ballot line in local elections.

Matt Sinovic, the group's executive director, told POLITICO his members are eager to hear from the mayor — specifically about his universal pre-K initiative. Iowa Democrats have tried but failed to implement universal pre-K in the past.

“The ideas that he has in his agenda, people get excited about it and see what he’s doing or trying to do in New York as things they would love to see implemented in Iowa,” Sinovic said. “He’s definitely a well-known progressive leader, and I think people would be excited to hear from him.”

In recent years, the holiday gala has drawn the likes of Sanders, Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander.

De Blasio insists he has no plans to seek national office, and although he acknowledges people associate Iowa with presidential ambition, he again vowed to serve out the next four years of his term.

“I said it before, I’ll say it again, I was running for one thing, which was mayor of New York City," he said. "I have four years and one month ahead, and that is what I plan to do."

Political observers remain unconvinced. While he may not be seeking the White House, de Blasio clearly sees himself as a national party leader.

“The grits haven’t hit the fan yet with what we are supposed to be doing as a party,” said Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “There has to be some sort of reckoning as to what we are at the soul of the Democratic Party and, if nothing else, de Blasio wants to be at the table when we are having that conversation.”

There is little precedent for mayors having much of a political future beyond their time in office. No mayor of a major American city has become president. That shouldn’t keep de Blasio from seeing how close he can get, Greer said.

“This is a way of him thinking about what he will do. Going to Iowa helps him maintain whatever he thinks his role is in progressive politics,” she said.

The timing of the trip, along with discussions of a federal political action committee to help fund his national jaunts, indicate the mayor is wasting little time getting out on the road. He faces myriad problems at home, though, including a less compliant City Council, a handful of fellow Democrats eyeing his seat, and a laundry list of pressing issues he's vowed to tackle in his second term.

Anticipating criticism over his Iowa trip, the mayor dismissed his detractors as making a tired argument, one that he does not think is shared by his supporters. That point will be emphasized in an op-ed set to publish on the mayor's Medium page Monday.

“I think it is infantile to believe that a mayor of New York City can’t go someplace else and still manage the government. It’s been going on for decades, for God’s sake,” de Blasio said. “I think my job is to make sure this city is managed well and change the lives of its people on every front. But it’s also to try to change the larger reality that is affecting us. If we don’t change the federal level, we will continue to be stymied.”

To that end, de Blasio said taking back the U.S. House of Representatives is his top national priority, a change that would have monumental implications for the city and state and the resources they receive from the federal government.

“The big future of this country is when a handful more states start to move, and they include Texas and Arizona and Florida too. Those will be decisive to the future of the country and the future of New York state and New York City,” de Blasio said. “That change is available — I’m saying that as a Democrat and a progressive — that change is available to us, and I’m obsessed with it.”

It’s not the first time de Blasio has eyed a national role.

His effort to get involved in the 2016 presidential election focused on pushing Clinton’s campaign to the left in a bid for her to embrace more of the liberal policies outlined by Sanders. During that fight, he struggled to remain loyal to Clinton, his former boss whose Senate campaign he ran in 2000.

Nearly a year after her loss, de Blasio seems almost liberated from the Clinton burden. He’s unconcerned with some Democrats' view that the party must move to the center in order to capture a larger part of the electorate, particularly in Midwestern states. He dismissed the notion that moderate candidates will be able to win elections in the next two years.

Populist progressives, he said, will hold the key.

“If Democrats are like warmed-over Republicans, why not go for the real thing?” de Blasio said. “If Democrats are not discernibly different, we’re not going to win, and I think that is the cautionary tale of 2016. In too many places, in the Rust Belt in particular, voters were not sure Democrats were going to do anything different for them.”

The mayor’s trip to Iowa is being funded by the Progress Iowa group, aides to the mayor said. He will be in Des Moines Dec. 19-20 and will travel with no more than two staffers.

Although he has not yet done so, de Blasio acknowledged he will need to set up a political action committee to raise money to fund his out-of-state excursions. Sources close to the mayor have confirmed there have been discussions with advisers to establish a federal PAC .

De Blasio, who faced federal and state investigations into his fundraising efforts, said he would disclose his donors and seek guidance from the Conflict of Interest Board, but he stopped short of committing to not accepting donations from people who have business before the city.

As he fixes his sights on Iowa, the mayor says he will deliver a New York City-centric message.

“I have one of the better bully pulpits as mayor of the biggest city in the country, and I believe if I do it the right way it will contribute," he said. "I don’t think there is any one person who is going to solve this. I think it’s going to take a lot of people, but I think it will contribute."