“My wife said to me, ‘Why do you keep going out there?’ And I said, ‘Because I feel like I’m doing something good for my country,'" Martin O'Malley said. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Martin O'Malley's new PAC aims to help down-ballot Democrats

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential candidate, is launching a new political organization Thursday to help Democratic candidates across the country, in a move that may represent another step toward a 2020 presidential run.

O’Malley has been more active than nearly any other party member in campaigning for local candidates around the country in 2017, visiting 21 states for fellow Democrats since last year’s election. His new Win Back Your State PAC will allow him to chip in for more hopefuls.


The kickoff comes as influential figures in the party put a premium on rebuilding the political infrastructure from the ground up after eight years of down-ballot devastation.

“This is not a time for anybody to sit on the sidelines or to try to read tea leaves for 2020,” he said in an interview ahead of the group’s launch. “My wife said to me, ‘Why do you keep going out there?’ And I said, ‘Because I feel like I’m doing something good for my country. You want me to sit at home and throw stuff at the television?’ Life is all about how we transform our grief. There are a lot of Democrats who, for the last year, have been wallowing in grief. I, instead, decided to get out on the road and help really decent people who are running."

“I’ve made an affirmative decision not to make a decision about 2020 right now,” he said, pledging to continue focusing on campaigns for others.

Still, O’Malley — who dropped out of 2016’s presidential race after Iowa, failing to gain traction against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders — has hardly shied away from 2020 speculation, hinting in interviews that he might run and even polling Iowa caucus-goers as early as March of this year.

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He has repeatedly returned to the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and the new formal effort could allow him to gain useful local allies in strategically important states if he does run again.

Win Back Your State carries echoes of separate new efforts from potential White House hopefuls: Former Vice President Joe Biden also launched a PAC to help him support down-ballot candidates, while Montana Gov. Steve Bullock similarly formed a federal PAC to finance his travel. Both former Housing Secretary Julián Castro and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti have also kicked off groups of their own, as have others, like former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander.

The new push from O’Malley, a former Democratic Governors Association chairman, comes just as Democrats are making significant gains in local races across the country, a shift after years of losses.

“We kind of fell into a trap that thinking president of the United States or United States senator were the only offices that mattered in our country, and the truth is every state matters,” he said. “It’s my hope, and I believe, that when we focus our efforts on winning back our states, that we’re going to restore a better balance and progress for our whole country. But we need the Democratic Party to start acting like a party again: no more ‘flyover’ states, and no more declaring any states permanently blue or permanently red.”

O’Malley appeared on the stump for a Washington state Senate candidate whose win last week handed the party full control of the legislative apparatus up and down the entire West Coast, and he also campaigned multiple times for local candidates in Virginia whose sweeping victories this month nearly flipped the House of Delegates from GOP control for the first time in almost two decades.

Just on Tuesday night, an Oklahoma legislative seat in a Tulsa-area district that had voted for Donald Trump by 39 points in 2016 switched to Democratic hands.

O’Malley had campaigned for the winning candidate, who became the 33rd Democrat to flip a seat across party lines in the past year.

