Hickenlooper Runs for President

In an interview last Tuesday with KOA’s Jerry Bell, John Hickenlooper’s launch of his presidential campaign was discussed. Some expanded thoughts:

Governor John Hickenlooper has stepped up his run for the presidency. He’s been contemplating it since the results of the 2016 presidential election created a wide open Democratic field. Hickenlooper has been testing the water for months. He first got into the Democratic nomination process in 2016 when Hillary Clinton considered him as a potential vice president and he gave a Philadelphia Convention speech.

He is a longshot in late 2018, but starting early and getting known by local political leaders and activists is one traditional route to the nomination. Hickenlooper is now traveling to states to help Democratic gubernatorial candidates in the November election, building some name identification and supporting possible grateful winners for later endorsements.

President Barack Obama has a beer at Wynkoop Brewing Co.
with Gov. John Hickenlooper, June 2016 | Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The Democratic debates in 2019 may look like the Republicans’ 17-person, two-tier events in 2015. Hickenlooper hopes to be the frontrunner of the outside D.C. field, betting that the gaggle of leading senate candidates may fragment the left of the party. The class and identity politics they mostly champion may fall out of favor with a party in need of winning moderates and independents. And indeed, the Democratic Party has turned to outside Washington governors in recent years: Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992. Not infrequently they win it all.

Mostly, Hickenlooper believes the effort will be fun and serve a purpose of bringing a message of civility and problem-solving to a national politics very short of it. As Kyle Trygstad and I discussed in The Atlantic: “The message is a good message. Whether there is a voting constituency, I don’t know.”

Hickenlooper’s entire career has been a longshot. He’s had a surfeit of what a politician most needs – luck.