An aide to Tim Kaine enters a diner in Charlottesville and informs the host that the Virginia senator is about to walk in. The host smiles and cracks a joke: “You mean the guy who lost to Trump?”

Ten months after the presidential election, Kaine is still trying to shed the stigma of being the vice presidential candidate on the ticket that came up short against Donald Trump, a man so reviled by Kaine’s fellow Democrats that many of them can’t bear the thought of him serving out his full four-year presidential term. The senator is back on the campaign trail — stumping in Virginia for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam and preparing for his own 2018 reelection campaign.


But even as Kaine tries to keep his focus on the next election, there are constant reminders of the last one — the only election he’s ever lost. Trump, it seems, looms over everything.

Kaine isn’t interested in relitigating one of the biggest electoral upsets in U.S. history. He looks visibly uncomfortable talking about the election and cautions against "overinterpreting" what went wrong.

Still, as Kaine sips coffee and takes selfies with supporters who recognize their senator, one can't help but detect some lingering resentment over the fact that voters rejected him and Hillary Clinton for a reality TV star. Trump "has frequently done things that I think are shocking for a president to do, but nothing he's done has been surprising," Kaine says. "There is nothing this guy has done that should surprise a person in this country based on the person he was before he took the oath of office."

Sign up here for POLITICO Huddle A daily play-by-play of congressional news in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

But Kaine isn’t questioning Trump’s legitimacy or pining for his impeachment, saying he still hopes Trump will be a good president and wants to work with his administration on issues of mutual interest, like infrastructure.

“Look, he was elected by 63 million people in the electoral college,” Kaine says. “He will be president for four years. I think you have to assume that he will.”

Instead, the 59-year-old senator is fighting Trump’s agenda in the Senate and focusing on what’s next: a statewide race in Virginia that will be one of the first chances for Democrats to deliver a major electoral rebuke to Trump. He’s working to bolster Northam and others running in Virginia’s off-year election this November.

After that, he says he’ll turn his attention to 2018. Kaine is urging Democrats to prioritize next year’s midterm elections over the 2020 presidential contest.

“There's a lot of skirmishing to grab the microphone for 2020,” he says. “If we have a good 2018, I think we'll do fine in 2020. If we have a bad 2018, it will be incredibly demoralizing and really hurt us in 2020.”

Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, discussed the senator’s future in a wide-ranging interview on a recent Saturday at a diner called the Nook on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. It was just a block from where 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed last month when a man drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during a white supremacist rally.

Kaine and Holton both appear disgusted as they reflect on Trump's reaction to the rally that brought Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan to their state. "Why did they come to Virginia?" Kaine asks, noting that most of the participants were from out of state. "If you have a fantasy about the Civil War, Virginia plays a role in your psychosis. These people hate to see Virginia moving forward."

The interview comes amid a campaign blitz for Kaine — 13 events in three days with Northam and the state’s Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general, Justin Fairfax and Mark Herring. It’s a bit of a warm-up act for the senator, who’s using these campaign stops to test the messages he’ll be delivering when he begins stumping for himself next year in his first-ever real reelection contest.

“I like being out on the trail a lot, and it is a little bit easier when your name isn't on the ballot,” he says.

Still, when you're Kaine, there's no escaping 2016.

In Charlottesville, he is greeted by University of Virginia students wearing “Stronger Together” jackets. At a campaign event in Newport News, he’s introduced to the crowd by Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott as the man who “should have been our vice president.”

Even Kaine’s own stump speech seeks to make sense of an election that many on the left are still struggling coming to terms with. He reminds his audiences that he and Clinton won the popular vote, and knocks Trump for promising voters “greatness” without offering any evidence of “goodness.”

For Kaine, a harmonica-playing former missionary whose aw-shucks demeanor during the presidential race earned him a reputation as “America’s dad,” this is about the most stinging invective he’s willing to hurl at a president who once retweeted a supporter who wrote that “Kaine looks like an evil crook out of the Batman movies.”

Even Kaine’s reelection campaign next year might not offer him the chance to move past 2016.

His only declared Republican challenger so far is Corey Stewart, a staunch Trump backer who sought to channel the real estate mogul during a bid for the GOP nomination for governor that he narrowly lost. A race against Stewart would almost certainly represent a rematch between the centrist vision put forward by Clinton and Kaine, and the take-no-prisoners approach of the populist conservative forces that powered Trump’s victory.

And then there’s Clinton. After retreating from the public eye for months, the former secretary of state is launching a book tour this month for her new campaign memoir, “What Happened.” Many Democrats are dreading having to relive the 2016 nightmare.

Kaine says he’s been in touch with Clinton “a number of times” over the phone, text and email since the election. But the senator, who tries to get through a book a week, has not read an advance copy and doesn’t plan to have any role in her book tour. His first few conversations with Clinton, he says, “were more about looking in the rearview mirror.” But their more recent chats “have been about looking in the windshield.”

“For Hillary, it's harder because she has to grapple with, ‘OK, what’s next?’” he says. “I didn't have to sort of decide what's next. I'm in the Senate, and the Senate has even gotten more important because I think the Senate is playing more of the role of the adult in the room right now for the American government.”

He rejects the notion that their defeat represented a rebuke of his and Clinton’s moderate approach, calling the schism in the Democratic Party “superficial.” He adds, though, that the party needs a “more compelling economic message,” pointing to an op-ed he wrote in USA Today in which he said Democrats should focus on “growth” and touted what has become the party’s new slogan, “Better skills, better jobs and better wages.”

But Kaine says he’s not putting himself forward as the one to lead the party out of the wilderness in 2020. He insists he has no presidential ambitions and wants to emulate the 30-year Senate career of former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), a family friend of Kaine’s who retired in 2009.

“I'm going to consider this the last job I'll ever hold,” says Kaine, whose past positions include Richmond mayor, Virginia lieutenant governor and then governor. He offers the obligatory addendum that he could be “voted out” and that “you can't get presumptuous.”

It’s at this point that Holton chimes in to underscore her husband’s decision to rule out a White House bid. “I ruled it out before he did,” says Holton, a former Virginia secretary of education. “I've always thought that the office he's in is most important.”

Kaine adds that he knows "my home state and being part of the political and economic and social progress of my state is what I'm really interested in." He says his committee assignments — Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Budget and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions — have positioned him well to have a major long-term impact in the Senate, both on the national stage and on issues of importance to his military-heavy home state.

In Virginia, after all, he and Clinton were the winners of last year’s presidential contest.

“Virginia has seen too many people like Donald Trump in our history — demagogues who didn't understand the virtue of the Jeffersonian equality principle,” he says. “We've seen Donald Trump before. In this state, we've put it behind us. We've shut the door.”