John Delaney: The 2020 long-shot candidate who’s gaining ground in Iowa

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

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🗓️ 5 June 2018

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

For Congressman John Delaney, the 2020 campaign is already underway. The money is there. So is the commitment. And people in are starting to pay attention. The little-known Maryland congressman thinks that’s part of what will transform a presidential run that pretty much no one takes seriously into the next Jimmy Carter-style, out-of-nowhere explosion onto the presidential debate stage. Delaney, who made his fortune founding two commercial lending companies, has already spent $1 million out of his own pocket, using it for TV ads in Des Moines and a campaign office in Iowa. Since last summer, he’s taken 11 trips to the caucus state, plus eight to New Hampshire. He’s even written a new campaign book. What does he have to show for it? While he’s been all but ignored in the national media, Delaney has an internal poll from Iowa that ranks him fifth in terms of name ID among potential Democratic candidates. Fifty-two percent of those likely 2020 Democratic caucus-goers polled know who John Delaney is, which puts him behind only Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker—and ahead of buzzed-about figures like Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Terry McAuliffe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover.
0:02.0	Donald Trump, he's not really a business leader. He's a business promoter.
0:08.0	Those are very different things. I mean, business leaders, they pay their bills.
0:12.0	They hire the best and the brightest. They think about their communities.
0:16.0	They think about multiple stakeholders. They believe life is long and that you build relationships. And most importantly,
0:22.6	they're focused on the future. They're always thinking about where the world is going and
0:25.6	how the position of their business. It's an amazing skill. Trump is kind of an anomaly because
0:29.6	he doesn't really do any of those things. He never pays his bills. He doesn't hire the,
0:33.6	he doesn't hire the best people. He hires people who like, tell him what he wants to
0:38.5	hear. He defaults on everyone he does business with. And he's just maniacally focused on
0:44.2	turning the clock back on everything. Today's guest, John Delaney, who's a congressman
0:48.6	from Maryland right outside of Washington, D.C., but he's also the only announced Democratic
0:53.5	candidate for president in 2020 so
0:55.9	far. There will obviously be more, but they'll all be behind Delaney, who made a fortune for himself
1:01.5	in what were essentially a couple of stopgap finance companies, helping provide the cash to medical
1:07.5	institutions while they were waiting for the insurance reimbursements to come in.
1:11.3	He announced his candidacy last summer after three terms in Congress.
1:15.9	He's been to Iowa already 11 times.
1:19.1	He's been to New Hampshire eight times.
1:20.9	He has commercials on the air.
1:22.4	He just released his campaign book.
1:24.8	And yet, I bet most of you have never heard of him.
	...

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