Foresight 2020: Bill de Blasio

WAMU 88.5

Published August 15, 2019 at 10:06 AM EDT

Democratic presidential candidate New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio delivers his stump speech speech at the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox at the Iowa State Fair as his wife Chirlane McCray and his son Dante de Blasio look on.

After five years as mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio is running to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.

But de Blasio has struggled to break through into the top tier of candidates — an Aug. 8 Monmouth poll of Iowa caucus-goers puts de Blasio at 0 percent. He also hasn’t qualified yet for the September round of Democratic debates.

From FiveThirtyEight’s assessment of his candidacy:

One of the reasons de Blasio is so easy to discount is that he’s been in the muck for the past six years, trying to enact his policies while running America’s largest city. This is the problem with actually holding office (and with doing it in plain sight of so much of the nation’s press corps).

But all that work does mean he can make a case for his executive experience. No major-party candidate has ever gone straight from being mayor to being the presidential nominee, but New York City has more people in it than the places presided over by several other presidential hopefuls, including Colorado and Washington state, and even South Bend, Indiana. De Blasio should be able to make a compelling case that he knows as much, if not more, about what it’s like to be in charge of the daily life of millions of people than governors like John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee, or fellow mayor Pete Buttigieg.

We talk with the mayor about his bid for the presidency and how he plans to differentiate himself from a crowded field.

GUESTS

Bill de Blasio, Mayor, New York City; candidate for the Democratic nomination for president; @BilldeBlasio

For more, visit https://the1a.org.