Martin O'Malley Looks Forward

Martin O'Malley has all the makings of a 2020 presidential candidate.  When he tells the press that he "just might" run again in 2020, it sounds more like like a definite affirmation than a hedge-betting answer.

For proof that O'Malley means that he definitely will run for President again when he says he "just might," all you have to do is look at what he's doing now.

O'Malley is setting up a new political action committee (PAC) for Democratic candidates for state and local offices. The PAC, Win Back Your State, is meant to help Democrats running for state legislative, municipal and school board offices get elected, because such offices are where the Democrats need to rebuild if they have any chance of regaining one of both houses of Congress in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020.  He's also doing this to subvert the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which continues to act aloof from the grass-roots elements of the party.  O'Malley has sent a message to local Democrats that they shouldn't bother looking for support from the party elites in their efforts to win lower offices.  Rather, they should just go out and compete for them, and he'll be there to help.  And not just with money; he plans to continue campaigning in person for whoever asks him for the favor.  It's the perfect way to get support from local Democrats for another presidential run.   

O'Malley is trying to buck up Democrats still reeling from and demoralized by Donald Trump's election to the Presidency.  O'Malley's efforts may seem obsessive, even maniacal; even his wife Katie thinks so.  "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?'" he said in a recent interview.  "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."

And in case you think he's crazy, former Vice President Joe Biden has started a similar PAC as well.

But O'Malley is doing even more.  Having visited Iowa and New Hampshire more than any other Democratic presidential hopeful in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, he has continued to visit those two states into 2017.   O'Malley is well-known in both states as a result of having campaigned aggressively for the Presidency at a time when the establishment was behind Hillary Clinton and insurgent Democrats moved to Bernie Sanders.  As Seth Masket explains in this must-read column at FiveThirtyEight.com, O'Malley set himself up in 2015 and 2016 for a second presidential run by spending a great deal of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, but he has since also positioned himself to play the long game in courting support among grass-roots Democrats for the party's presidential nomination while the party establishment is too rudderless to control the nomination process for 2020 as it did for 2016.  The DNC is not only rudderless, it's broke; the Republican National Committee has continued to raise and save more money than the DNC.  Is there anything the DNC has more of than the RNC?  Yes - debt, to the tune of $3.2 million.  And though the Republicans are driving up the debt in Congress, the RNC is debt-free with more money rolling in by the day.    

O'Malley is not taking the reality of Trump's Presidency in silence.  But he's not taking any guff from establishment Democrats, either; the DNC snubbed him once before, and now he's returning the contempt as he helps down-ballot Democratic candidates on his own.  That's not a way to get Democratic establishment support for a presidential candidacy (and who cares about them?), but it's a way to get the rest of the party to support you.   Katie O'Malley may think this is all quixotic now, but let's see what she thinks about it when she makes her debut as First Lady at the 2021 presidential inaugural balls.