New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has entered the race for the Democratic nomination for President, making him the 23rd candidate in an already crowded field.
This morning, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who had been flirting with the idea of running for President for the better part of the past year with frequent visits to Iowa and other early primary states, made his decision official to become the 23rd candidate in the Democratic field for President:
Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayor of New York City, announced on Thursday that he was running for president, seeking to show that his brand of urban progressive leadership can be a model for the rest of the nation.
It will be a steep challenge: He becomes the 23rd Democrat to enter the presidential race, and he does so against the counsel of many of his trusted advisers, and in the face of two centuries of history.
No sitting mayor has been elected to the presidency, and if Mr. de Blasio is to be the first, he must overcome daunting deficits in polls and fund-raising.
His announcement, in a three-minute video titled “Working People First,” comes after months of groundwork that has included visits to early presidential primary states, a fund-raiser in Boston and a circuslike news conference this week in the lobby of Trump Tower.
In precampaign stops in Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire, Mr. de Blasio, 57, has said that the country is witnessing “the dawning of a new progressive era,” and said in interviews that his leadership in New York should be seen as a model for how “you can make profound progressive change and make it quickly.”
He is fond of citing his “pre-K for all” program as a prime example; it was one of Mr. de Blasio’s earliest initiatives, and it remains his largest success. He also highlights various measures to attempt to reduce income inequality in the city, and to end the policing practice of stop-question-and-frisk, which a federal judge ruled discriminated against black and Latino men.
“All of the things I’ve told you, they’re happening,” the mayor said last month at the National Action Network’s annual convention. “They’re not words, they’re deeds. They’re happening here. They can happen all over this country.”
Mr. de Blasio plans to fly to Iowa on Thursday night. He will campaign there on Friday and then visit South Carolina for campaign stops on Saturday and Sunday.
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The mayor will have to make up a huge fund-raising disadvantage as he builds out a campaign staff, and close a seemingly insurmountable gap in polls. In a Monmouth University poll last month, Mr. de Blasio had a net favorability of zero: 24 percent like him, 24 percent do not like him. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the only candidate with a higher unfavorability number, 26 percent, but his favorability rate was 67 percent.
Mr. de Blasio seemed undaunted, saying that if he had listened to the polls he would have never run for mayor or public advocate. Mr. de Blasio joins a crowded field that already includes two other current mayors: Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., and Wayne Messam of Miramar, Fla.
The mayor who came closest to the presidency was from New York City: DeWitt Clinton, who won his party’s endorsement but lost to James Madison in 1812. The last sitting mayor of New York who tried to run for president was John V. Lindsay in 1972; Rudolph W. Giuliani, who left City Hall in 2002, unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in 2008.
In fact, it has been nearly a century since any New York City mayor went on to be elected to any office; the last was Ardolph Loges Kline, who was acting mayor in 1913, and served a term in the House of Representatives from 1921 to 1923.
Here’s the campaign video that de Blasio posted this morning to YouTube announcing the start of his campaign:
DeBlasio’s announcement isn’t exactly getting warm coverage from the New York Post:
Deblasio, whose full legal name is Warren Wilhelm de Blasio, Jr., was born in New York City but spent much of his early life in the Boston area to the point that to this day he remains a Red Sox fan, much to the ire of many of his fellow New Yorkers.
