Kirsten Gillibrand is the latest Democrat to launch a presidential exploratory committee.
For the next few months, you’re going to hear a lot of high-profile Democrats announce they are forming an “exploratory committee” for a 2020 White House run. Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro have taken that step. Kirsten Gillibrand is the latest candidate to start her 2020 campaign this way. More will follow.
When the words “exploratory committee” flick across your Twitter stream or TV screen, it means two things:
Presidential candidacies have become a two-step dance. First, you announce you are exploring a run for president. Then you announce you are running for president. Barack Obama announced an exploratory committee in January 2007 and then made it official in February. Mitt Romney starting exploring in April 2011 and then formally joined the race at the beginning of June. It’s not a must, though: Hillary Clinton went ahead and launched her 2016 campaign, without bothering with an exploratory committee.
It might sound silly — and, frankly, it kind of is! — but the “exploratory” phase has real value for candidates. They can raise a bunch of money. They can start polling and traveling and hiring staff. By the time they officially announce their candidacy, the campaign is in effect already up and, ah, running.
One side benefit: Candidates get two news cycles in the all-important bid to raise their profile with voters. They’ll get headlines once for the committee news and then again for the formal announcement.
In other words, “exploratory” is a bit of a misnomer in the presidential context. I asked a handful of election experts and nobody could name a notable person who established an exploratory committee and then declined to announce as a candidate. If you’re exploring, you’re running. The 2020 campaign has already begun.
Exploratory committees are subject to a bit of interpretation — in 2012, Newt Gingrich appeared to have had an unregistered committee but then just announced he was running for president; Jeb Bush broke the mold entirely in 2016 — but the typical version looks like this.
To form an exploratory committee, all a candidate really needs to do is file a statement of their candidacy to the Federal Election Commission and slap the word “exploratory” on the name of their campaign’s committee. That’s it.
But once you file a statement of candidacy, even if you use the “exploratory” label, you’re a candidate in the eyes of the law. “There is no legal distinction” between a campaign committee and this kind of exploratory committee, Brendan Fischer, who works on federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, says.
(Another type of committee — known as a “testing the waters” committee — used to be more popular because fewer disclosures were required. But a change in federal law in 2000 requiring more reporting to the FEC has turned candidates off them, Michael Toner, former FEC chair under President George W.
