With the Democratic Party in disarray and activists fretting over the its alarmingly shallow bench, a familiar name is injecting itself back into the 2020 conversation: Joe Biden. A few weeks ago, the former vice president raised eyebrows when he chided Hillary Clinton for her stunning electoral defeat and expressed regret for not jumping into the 2016 race when he had his chance. “I never thought she was a great candidate,” he said. “I thought I was a great candidate.”

Were he to run again, Biden would be 78 in 2021, making him by far the oldest candidate to assume the presidency. But it seems the veteran politician is still keeping his options open. The New York Times reports that Biden is launching his own political action committee, American Possibilities PAC. The group’s ostensible purpose is to help Democrats fund-raise for the 2018 midterms, but it also fulfills a secondary objective for Biden: keeping his name in the conversation and sending a clear signal that he is not prepared to retire. “Thinking big is stamped into the DNA of the American soul,” Biden said, according to the Times, which received an advance copy of a statement he’ll publish Thursday. “That’s why the negativity, the pettiness, the small-mindedness of our politics today drives me crazy.”

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“Joe is not going away, and you know that,” Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, said Thursday on CBS This Morning. “He loves politics, he loves what he’s doing, and he said he would stay involved. So he set up this PAC because he's going to be involved in the midterm elections.”

It’s not the first time that Biden has stirred up Democratic politics by looking as if he might throw his hat in the ring. He agonized throughout the summer of 2015 about challenging Clinton and, after she lost, didn’t hold back from criticizing her campaign’s missteps. Several polls conducted during the election concluded that he would have succeeded where Clinton failed, and Biden himself has not refrained from saying so. “I had planned on running for president and although it would have been a very difficult primary, I think I could have won,” he said during a speech at Colgate University in March. “I had a lot of data, and I was fairly confident that if I were the Democratic Party’s nominee, I had a better chance than ever of being president. But do I regret not being president? Yes. I was the best qualified.”

At least some Republicans agree. “Biden would have won in a landslide,” Senator Ben Sasse recently told the Times. And as my colleague T.A. Frank noted last month, Biden would hit the campaign trail with most of President Barack Obama’s strengths and few of his liabilities. “A lot of Obama’s biggest policy moves—like health-care reform and the stimulus plan and the crackdown on some forms of predatory lending—are popular with voters, and Biden can emphasize those. Some of the vulnerabilities of Obama, who came to be perceived by his critics as insufficiently supportive of cops, would be neutralized by the strong law-and-order record that Biden had in the Senate.” Most important, Frank writes, “Biden doesn’t just empathize with blue-collar workers; they were his neighbors when he was growing up. Biden’s own dad lost money in business and sold used cars. He might ham it up a little, with folksy stories about how ‘my dad’ said this or that about the dignity of work. But he seems to mean it.”

Whether or not Biden runs, he remains a critical fund-raising draw for Democrats. And as he stacks his schedule with policy conferences, keeping his name circulating in the 2020 rumor mill can only help. The PAC itself will allow Biden to fund-raise on behalf of Democrat candidates in gubernatorial and congressional races, building additional political goodwill. Of course, such a PAC could backfire, too: Clinton was roundly criticized when she recently launched Onward Together with the goal of being an “activist citizen and part of the resistance” to Trump. Clinton diehards applauded, but just about everyone else cringed. Biden isn’t nearly as polarizing a figure, but if the 2016 race proved anything, it was that many voters were eager for change. Biden, popular though he is, has been in Washington since 1972.