A decision by former Vice President Joe Biden to launch a 2020 bid for the White House won’t affect fellow Democratic presidential contender Terry McAuliffe’s own political calculus.
“I do think Vice President Biden’s probably running from my conversations with him,” former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe told CNN on Monday. “He’s got to make his decision. Mine will be totally independent of what the vice president does. I’ve always been a big fan of Joe Biden’s. I hope he gets in the race. The more the merrier.”
McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee’s chairman in the early 2000s, also said Monday he would announce whether he will seek his party’s presidential nomination “by the end of the first quarter.” He told MSNBC last week there was a 50 percent chance he’ll run for the highest office in the country.
McAuliffe said that regardless of who wins the primary process, he is optimistic a Democrat will be sitting in the Oval Office come 2021.
[Read: 45 Democrats jostling to challenge Trump in 2020]
“We’re going to beat Trump. We’re going to beat Trump in 2020 if he’s still there. We don’t know the answer to that question, but we’re going to beat him because we’re going to have a positive, realistic agenda,” he said. “People want results. They want people to get things done. What did people want for governor of Virginia? I had a tough economy, rebuilt it. I inherited a huge deficit, left a big surplus. That’s what people want.”
McAuliffe’s comments come amid multiple reports Biden will make his 2020 plans public “soon.” They also come after the Washington Post last week published an opinion piece by McAuliffe in which he urged Democrats to campaign on practical polices rather than ideological promises, such as a federal jobs guarantee and universal free college.
